Determined to Tan

Togo = Developed

2010-05-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

Winning the War on Development since 2008

We're approaching the end here at Determined to Tan. It's been a long, hot, long, itchy, uncomfortable, dirty, hot, long couple of years and in just a few short days I wont have the right to bitch quite as much anymore. However, fearing a lack of comedic material that may ensue I've decided to spite my good fortune and bitch even more when I get back to the states. Do what you love, love what you do.

In any case, I did it! I got this place up and running! Togo is developed! Time to get the hell out! In truncated form, because I'm over my novella phase, here are 11 things I sure thought were swell - because prime numbers are just better. With pictures, so you'll actually have a reason to keep reading.

11. Coiffeur 'Wait and See', the worst haircut of my young life-

10. Finding a zoo in Lome-

9. Afternoons at my local bar. (This is my hundredth novel finished in country--)

8. Receiving my third, absolutely legal, concurrent American passport. Its gotta be some kind of record--

7. Accra - I think this one is self-explanatory

6. Steven's Visit

5. Falling into the Latrine

4. Arriving in Sierra Leone and boating to Freetown from the airport

3. Getting hit by a moto and getting a free vacation to South Africa

2. Rayan and I taking a 10 hour moto trek through the Togolese brush, up a mountain in Benin and crossing back over in one day.

1. Leaving! Saturday, May 22nd its official!

Down on the coast, we say that the second happiest day in a man's life is the day he buys a boat. The happiest day in his life is when he sells it. That's a bit of what its like - I'm glad I came, I had a blast and abused every privilege there was, but even gladder to be getting the hell out! Now, off to find a few cheesecakes and a hot shower.

This picture serves no purpose. But damn, thems a lot of chickens.

The Best Medicine

2010-05-19T02:59:00.000-07:00

There are just some stories that can only be truly related in person. You need inflection, you need gesticulation, you need good solid cursing. A few stiff drinks don't hurt, either. If you are reading this, know that you are going to ask me to tell you this one again, in person. This could be the defining point in my life. Get comfortable.

I traveled last weekend, from Friday to Monday, visiting friends and Togolese family during a 4 day journey to say my goodbyes before I leave next week. My final stop-over was in Dzigbe, the highest village in Togo, right beneath the peak of Mount Agou, the same village I stayed in for 3 days in December of 2008. Christina and some friends had visited while I was in South Africa and she promised to bring me back for one last visit before I left. We passed a pleasant evening full of grain alcohol, mashed tubers and scuttering cockroaches to awake to a cool Monday morning. The morning passed in a normal fashion - light breakfast, hiking (what they call 'walking' here) to say hello to friends and family, and a scary end-of-days thunderstorm that detained us until about noon and then a large lunch.

Pretty routine, so far, yeah? But good, now we're caught up.

Now, take stock of what you are doing right now. Sitting at work, at home, maybe drinking a cup of coffee, maybe listening to some music, maybe a Kenny G Christmas record from 1989, maybe thinking about how nice it would be if him and Yo Yo Ma would just go ahead and make out already. Now imagine if, 10 minutes from now you were transported somewhere deep, dark, smelly, you were covered in shit, surrounded by huge, satan-worshiping, radioactive, mutant roaches - and you had to poop really quite badly. Hard to fathom?

After lunch, I felt nature creeping up on me, and decided to saunter down the path to the little shack covering the 3 ft wide pit we used as a toilet. Upon my approach, I imagine the tired, neglected latrine had something of an existential crisis. Faced with the prospect of staying a latrine for the rest of its days, a sad looking affair, all wood and rusty sheet metal erected over a large hole spanned by 10 or so pieces of wood, with no chance of an independent career change, it saw, in me, a way out. Or down, I suppose, depending on where you're standing. Giving up the ghost in the most monumental latrine-fashion imaginable, as I stepped in the entire floor gave way and sent me into a head long dive straight the fuck down.

I'm going to give you a second here. Take a breath. Unbeknownst to me, I now hear that this is a nightmare scenario for many people.

Standing up, I tried to take stock of the situation in the calmest way possible. Lucky for me, mountain people in Togo don't really use latrines - they're partial to rocks in the woods for their dirty work. I find drowning in a 7ft pool of liquid shit quite an undignified way to die. Unfortunately for me however, I was still AT THE BOTTOM OF A 10FT DEEP LATRINE WADING IN A FOOT OF PISS AND SHIT. Roaches and, oddly enough, crickets - huge 3in long black old testament looking fuckers- were running around everywhere and crawling all over me. Little built-to-scale-models of Mount Doom were sticking their peaks out through the liquid on the floor, I had no network coverage that deep in the ground, it smelled like a rotting goat, and I still had to poop really bad. Thinking about it logically, I knew the first thing that I needed to do.

I dropped trou and took a dump.

That taken care of, I stood up and noticed that there was still one giardia-yellowed board spanning the width of the pit, all that was left of the floor. Knowing that it would be my only way out, I gave a flat-footed jump an olympian would have been proud of and latched on, hoping that it wouldn't give way (the sick sucking noise that my shoes made when leaving the floor of shit gave a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole affair). Looking left and right, I used small grooves in the latrine walls as toeholds, each one harboring a dozen or more nightmare insects that crunched and squirted underfoot, and clambored my way to the top of that shit-streaked board.

I laid there for a moment, looking at the overcast sky, the wind rushing over the various liquids covering my body, cooling me as if I had just stepped out of a hot shower, and I began to laugh. Hysterical, maniacal, uncontrollable laughter that started deep in my gut and erupted out in rolling ululations that shook the slim board that was still underneath me.

Cause hey, what else is there to do?

Election-Fever Pt. 2

2010-03-22T03:34:00.000-07:00

So, elections have finished here, and, in a shocking turn of events, Faure Essozinma Gnassingbe came from way behind late in the tallying to once again take his place as the noble and fearless leader of the proud and powerful nation of Togo. Seriously. We had no clue he was going to take it away again. (*cough* thats a bloody lie *cough*) But, please, can anything else possibly be expected from the benevolent 'fils du terroir', the one man who's love for the country runs deep, but who's EU-aid-lined pockets run even deeper. Lets be real, if you have an infinite amount of money to spend, you're going to win. All you have to do is hand out free stuff. Faure's face is EVERYWHERE in the country. Seriously, do you have any idea how many free t-shirts, hats, fans, pencils, posters, stickers, calendar-pens (those neat pens that have a calendar that rolls out of them. hey you know you'd use them if you were here!), scrunchies, swatches, flags, berets, and cash bribes were given out over the past 3 months? I've heard rumours of large trucks filled with sodabi just going up and down the country getting everyone drunk for free. Who wouldn't vote for this guy?

Higher, Longer, Stronger. Yeah, I bet he tells that to all the girls.

You know, I was going to post pictures of some other candidates and talk about the shit-ton of people who didn't vote for Faure, but do you have any idea how many pull-out-calendar-pens the opposition candidates gave me?

Answer: 0

Hey, UFC, losing is for losers! You Suck! I bet you don't even know how to use a calendar-pen! SUCK IT!

so, you know what? Fuck those guys. Screw them and their pretentious 'rallies' and 'marches' and 'demonstrations' and 'freedom frites' - all of their screaming and anger and un-cool, un-pen-giving fundraisers. My vote is with this guy--

A true gangster can write a letter and check the date. AT THE SAME TIME.

Actually, I would've voted for this guy, but he told me he was too busy to run for president. What with the funny-stick dance routine and all.

Goin all the way in 2015

So, to the meat of it, what was it like here during elections? Pretty damn boring. The general paranoia that was instilled after the last elections still exists, but nothing happened this time around. People got edgy around the time they started announcing election results, but apart from that, no one that I know really seemed to care. In the words of my land-lady, "Nothing will change no matter who wins. They're all thieves." Damn, where's the love Togo? Where's the love...

This image would be so much more poignant unfurling from the inside of a pen.

Election-Fever Pt. 1

2010-03-08T04:28:00.000-08:00

I'm sure that all of you are up-to-date on your political leaders of insignificant West African countries and their impossible to pronounce names, but seeing as a few days ago Togo had their presidential elections, I'll take a moment to refresh your memories. Everyone, I'd like to introduce you to Eyadema Gnassingbe, Togo's 3rd president (read: effectively the only one that's ever been), holding concurrent records for Africa's longest-running dictatorship, and snazziest porteur of blue suede since the King himself.

Everyone, Papa Gnas

Papa Gnas' 38 year "reign of terror" was marked by an almost casual brutality, slapstick incompetence and incredible 70s haute-couture-

The couch is 100% baby seal hide

I have it on good word that Eyadema had 50 wives and sired over 200 children cause, hey, what the hell else is there to do when bathing in Channel #5, laughing at the United Nations, and dumping bodies of political dissenters out of helicopters gets old? Eyadema took power in a coup d'etat back in '68 and could just never be bothered to leave. Upon his death in 2005, turmoil ensued in Togo, with his son (go figure) rising up in the vacuum of power. Baby Faure shouldn't have technically by which I mean legally been the guy that took over the presidency, but hey, first come first serve, bitches.

It is important to point out that the Gnassingbe's come from the North of the country. They are Kabye. The assassinated president in 68 was from the South of the country. He was Ewe. The entire army is Kabye. Most of the ministers are Kabye. Back in the day scholarships went not to the kids who won the scholarships, but to Kabye kids. However, the Ewe are the most numerous and, some say, more economically powerful just by their numbers. So, there in a nutshell is where problems arise here.

The mighty 'whatyoutalkinboutwillisasaurus' (Papa Gnas was one of the last 'political dinosaurs' to finally kick the bucket in Africa)

That was quick and entertaining, right? So now we come to elections a few days ago - pt. 2 coming up!

Intergration My Ass

2010-02-18T02:18:00.000-08:00

The central principle of the Peace Corps doctrine, our modus operandi of sorts, is 'cultural integration' - the idea that to institute lasting, sustainable (they frigging love that word) development, we have to integrate ourselves into the local communities in which we live so as to be more than your run-of-the-mill development worker - we have to be one with the community - we have to become one of those who we serve. And believe me, granola women line up around the corner for this tripe. It doesn't matter whether I believe in it, or even whether it works, the first thing I'm doing when I get back to the states is buying an industrial sized box of extra-large condoms (yeah, thats right) and flying straight to Seattle to hang out at vegan coffee shops -

"why, is that a cruelty-free fair-trade organic quoinoa-cocoa and wheat germ mochachino you have there? Well here are some pictures of me with African children. Well, yes, Destini with an 'i', I think we would make beautiful offspring."

Easy as shooting baby seals in a cage.

However, the truth of the matter is that I could live here for 1000 years wearing nothing but pagne while sucking down sodabi every morning between brisk bouts of beating my wife for not wanting to bear my 12th child and going to see the local voodoo wizard to inflict my enemies with AIDS, but I'll still just be the Yovo. How can I be so sure? Lets say the truth comes from the mouths of babes -

The true face of terror

Children will always be terrified of me here. Like, petrified-from-fear-can't-even-scream sort of terrified. Parents can't get enough of this - they actually carry their terrified infants to me just to watch them freak out. This is always a great reminder of how knee-deep in the community I am here.

Salone for the Holidays

2010-01-03T02:17:00.000-08:00

Peace Corps Sierra Leone entered the country in 1962 and left with the onset of war in 1994. It has been 15 years since the last volunteer was active in the country and so it goes without saying that when the first person in the airport after my arrival asked me without provocation "Are you Peace Corps?" I was close to shocked. When the second person I ran into - the lady checking luggage for contraband asked the same question the moment she saw me, I began to feel like I was in the middle of a pre-meditated gag. But, no, I was to run into this same question time and time again during my two weeks in Salone and it never lost its shock-value. My first day in Freetown I ran into a 60 year old woman who wanted to show me her certificates from all of the "Peace and Reconciliation" trainings she had been to that had been put together by PC volunteers. She still had the flimsy paper certificates framed and hanging after 20 years. Still not making this up.

The Cotton Tree, Downtown Freetown. The building to the left of the tree was the PC office and the embassy many years ago.

I had just left the border of nowhere and was heading directly to the middle when we ran across a police checkpoint (just a man at a shack with a rope pulled across the road). They were being quite exacting, searching bags and checking IDs of the 2 other motos stopped with us. The cop approached me and, I swear on my mother's life this is no exagerration, he asked me 'are you Peace Corps?', I of course said yes, and he slapped me on the back and then gave me a huge smile and let me go on without as much as glancing at my papers.

I arrived at Shenge (go on, try to find it on a map) after another tortuous hour on a suicidal moto-driver's back seat down what appeared to be a dried stream-bed (that's called a road here).

At least I went in dry season

I had the number of a Reverend in Shenge, given to me by the head of the Moto station in border-of-nowhere Moyamba. When Reverend Moses (and come on, really what else should he be named?) asked what I did, I meekly posited 'Peace Corps', fearing a kiss on the lips or something, but all they did was give me the old PC house that the previous 15 or so volunteers lived at when they were posted there (honest, had no clue) and then asked me to beg PC Admin to put another volunteer there. Everyone in this village spoke beautiful english because they were all taught by American PC vols. And now that they were grown adults, their children spoke great english. I'll tell you, I've just avoided asking the question 'do we do any good here' as PC, because A) I didnt think the answer would justify our existence and B) I was having too much fun to care. But now, after setting foot in a country that hasn't seen us in over a decade and seeing the actual effect that we've had, I feel quite good.

I flew to Sierra alone, didn't know a soul or anything about the lay of the land and had the most fortuitous, serendipidous, pleasant vacation I've ever taken - Peace Corps is coming back to SL in June and I was able to meet up with the acting Admin officer who is putting the program together. He took me out for lunch and then handed me a key - it was the key to the country director's 3bdrm apartment overlooking greater freetown - since the country director has yet to arrive, the AO thought it would be nice to let me stay there - big screens, leather couches, a sauna - add to that the miles and miles of deserted beaches and accomodating Saloneans who wanted nothing more than for me to understand that their country was peaceful and that they love visitors, and I can assure you that I was living it up over the holidays - I hope everyone out there had just as great a time.

*I had to take all the photos from the net because my camera went walk-around with someone else as I was flying back from Sierra Leone - me and cameras aren't having much luck lately --

I Spy Something Red

2009-11-29T22:37:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning with a start - the heavy breathing, instantly cognizant type of start where you aren't going back to sleep for a long time, if ever, and something ridiculous is going on in your head. I ate Indian food last night. I didn't drink. I swam in the pool all day and was exhausted (living in paradise is taxing). Nothing done to keep me awake. But, in any case, I woke up thinking about minibottles. As a quick reminder, in 2005 SC was the last state in the nation to legalize 'free-pour' (SC is the only state in the nation that needs a technical term for pouring alcohol from a bottle - wow) - eschewing the airplane mini-bottles for the accepted set-up found in all 49 other states and a few territories.

A Bartender's worst nightmare

Now, I'm sure any of you from outside the Palmetto State are thinking this is a no-brainer, right? Well, actually, no, because you see, by changing the law that forced restaurants to serve alcohol in mini-bottles, you were hitting someone in the wallet - namely the makers of the bottles themselves. So, in true political fashion, the manufacturers (who didn't even live in the state) hired a couple of lobbyists who fought like mad to keep mini-bottles in. Their argument? That if we changed to free-pour, someone was going to get a weaker drink. Seriously, that was it. And you know what? It almost worked.

You see, mini-bottles have a regulated 1.7 ounces of alcohol per bottle. No fibbing possible. So, as the lobbyists logic goes, if, on the free-pour system and bartender likes you, you'll get more, if not, then less. This was their tactic. Scare the locals into paralysis on the logic that sometime, somewhere, someone was going to get an unfair deal. They, of course, never mentioned the fact that drink costs would drop, the huge reduction in waste, or the benefit to the bars and restaurants that would result due to the tax structure. Nor did anyone bring to mind the impossiblity of making, say, a Long Island Ice Tea with mini bottles - $15 dollars for a drink in rural South Carolina? Yeah, that pleased a lot of folks. I'm glad to report that today we drink out of big bottles like big boys and girls.

Not Scary

So, why exactly was I thinking about mini-bottles before dawn? Because it came to me that mini bottles are like privatized healthcare. I see a strong resemblance between the mini-bottle lobbyists and private insurance lobbyists - shove enough fear down the everyman's throat - spit enough hellfire and brimstone to the most demoralized American demographic, and there might be a shot at keeping things the way they are. And whats the #1 sure-fire way to make any mother-loving, hard-working American recoil in disgust? THE RED SCARE.

Hey, that looks like fun...

Now listen, I'm not much of a polictically charged person. I like low taxes and grilling on weekends like any other guy. But I am positive that healthcare can be done better in the states. I don't have any proof - I'm not an expert and I don't have an over-estimated sense of righteousness that comes from watching 24 hour news stations. I can't regurgitate facts or percentages. I just, in the most American of stereotypes, feel it. I don't trust a company whose only way of making money is either A) Raising Premiums or B) Denying Claims. And I sure as hell don't trust people whose best argument is based on fearmongering and paranoia. Listen to Matt, here, everyone - NO ONE on Capitol Hill has their thumb on a direct line to God or Allah, or the All-Being, or the Borg. No one is getting assimilated. They all are just as clueless as us, maybe with just one large difference - their health-care is free.

Not Real

But either way, I'm not worried - I've got my long-term plan figured out. When I get so old that I become a burden, I'll just kill somebody. At least then I'll get nationalized round-the-clock care with free health benefits. I guess only criminals deserve the dirty commie-run free health care.

Motorcycle Diaries

2009-11-24T23:28:00.000-08:00

I can't say that it hurt all that much. In fact, pain hasn't really been a factor in all of this. It's been more time and inconvenience, and above all, money. The sheer amount of money that has been spent on me in the past few weeks is (at least to me, who's perspective is admittedly a bit skewed) staggering. In short, crossing the street in front of my quartier a week or so ago, a motorcycle hit me and sent me on an all expenses paid vacation to South Africa. I didn't even see him coming. Just one minute I was standing, and the next minute I wasn't. The law of mass tonnage in action, me on the receiving end. I got some pretty nice gashes and chipped my left tibia. While I made out lucky with a pretty minor set of wounds, PC was worried about a bone infection (which I didn't even know could happen), so a few days later I was in a hired car going straight to the airport in Accra. I was flown first class because, as I was told, I needed "room for my leg" and spent 8 hours gorging on wine and caviar (not an exaggeration - the ticket cost over $4000USD, you'd better believe I abused those stewardesses) (and, hey, since you're here, fun fact - 'stewardesses' is the longest word in English that you type solely with the left hand).

Yeah, well, you should see the other guy. Yes, that's a bath robe.

Fast forward a week later and I'm in the lap of luxury. In exchange for a couple hours of surgery I've got hot showers, tea and sherry in my room, A/C, personal drivers, heaps and heaps of bacon for breakfast, $20/day per diem (!!! more than double what I make in Togo), malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and great wine. I'm here with a few other invalids from across Africa and we are having a blast.

Pretoria, The City of Jacarandas. Known in PC circles as Paradise.

Pretoria is, seriously, as pretty as these photos (which I stole from the net.. the doc here dropped my camera on the first day and broke it. He doesn't know that, but what am I supposed to say - "thanks for saving my leg and all, but really, you're gonna need to replace that"?). There are a few euro-centric idiosycracies I've run into - driving on the other (read: wrong) side of the road, silly English (a local bakery was promoting "ass. butter danishes" the other day. Taxis here have signs that read "please don't bang the door". You know it's funny!), and hardly concealed racism. I'm going to go out on a tiny limb here and say this is probably the most racist place I've ever spent any time in. And I'm from Laurens, folks - that's saying a lot. The Boers (read: Whitey) all speak Afrikaans, which I've heard called a child's version of dutch, it's degrees of separation consisting of dropping all gender, most conjugations, using ridiculous vocabulary (foregoing all of the wonderfully colorful dutch cuss words), sounding even more disgusting than Dutch when spoken, and being even easier to make fun of than Flemish, Dutch's other bastard relative.

But, even being back in the 1st world gets old after a while. There's only so much you can eat, so many movies you can watch, only so low that the A/C can go before you get cold and want to go outside. So, it's been fun and hopefully I'll be back in Togo by Monday. I've got a bit of work and healing to do before I head out to Sierra Leone on the 14th :) So don't feel sorry for me, I've been recommending that all of my friends go play in traffic - the righteous scars I'll have are only the tip of the perk-iceberg.

English 101

2009-11-05T02:23:00.000-08:00

During last week's visa-trip to Accra, a small bit of bile I had been carrying around in my inner monologue of hatred since I had arrived here was added to in copious amounts and is now, not without a certain relief, overflowing onto these only-so-recently angel white pages. The cible of my ire today is what seems so charming and provincial to the first time visitor to post-colonized West Africa – the version of language you hear here. In case you missed your pre-requisite 2 seconds of African history, it goes a little something like this – many years before the invention of olympic curling and dance-offs, the only way for a country to flex nuts was a good old-fashioned subjugation – thusly, bored white people (namely Brits and Frenchies*) banged their heads together and decided to go slaughter some folks who had the one thing they still lacked - melanin.

*but then, lets not forget the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or the bastard-whipping-boy-of-Europe, The Belgians, who turned out to be the most sadistic fuckers on the continent. With their entire national identity based on chocolate, waffles, and regularly servicing both France and Holland orally, they instantly took a shine to the idea of being at the top of the food chain, even if only in asshole-of-the-asshole-of-the-world, The African Congo. They added an almost zealous fervor to their slaughtering and slave-herding that their big brothers in Europe never seemed to grasp.

Seriously, Belgium, where's the bad?

While theories differ on what drove lesser European nations to colonize the dark continent, it is commonly accepted that the English were trying to escape from their cuisine, while the French were trying to escape the French (“for God so loved the world, he created France. To prove his sense of humour, he created the French.”). When asked for comment on exactly why England was laying claim to vast swaths of the African coastline through bloody and dictatorial means, The King of England went on record by saying, “'cause hey, fuck 'em.” Fast-forward a few hundred years and a few imaginary lines drawn on a map irrespective of language, tribe or religion, and you have the celebrity-philanthropist-wet-dream-cluster-fuck that is today West Africa. And, just to make sure the ungrateful natives wouldn't forget who descended upon them like the hand of god and laid the five-finger bitch slap of colonization across their broad, black asses, the whites left them with decent roads, inferiority complexes and western languages. Europe: 1 Africa: 0.

That catches us up to just about last week, where my hatred for an as-till-now innocuous word boiled over and made me go get drunk. This word, one of my new scapegoats for all of my problems here is, drumroll please, – Somehow. Now, I know you were expecting something much more obvious, but this is the word that makes me grit my teeth every time I hear it. Understand that I'm not a linguist or a lexicographer or even a very good talker of the English language, so I can't exactly tell you how this word is used incorrectly, it's simply that every time I hear it, I know it shouldn't be used that way. Par exemple –

Q: So, I guess you're pretty excited about leaving for your big trip tonight, yeah?
A: (After considerable pause for epic effect) Yes, somehow.

Is this exactly wrong? Couldn't say. Here's another.

Q: Well, you don't speak English perfectly, but you do understand a bit, right?
A: (Again, pensive pause) Somehow.

And its not just the butchery of the word, its the pronounciation. It sounds like some type of Indian greeting with heavy accent on the end – sum-HOW.

While in Ghana, I noticed that ALL the volunteers there have picked up this most annoying of traits – to wit, a text I received from a friend who was late -

Hey, I'm sorry it's taken so long, we just left. I'm still coming, somehow.

...WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?????? (also, that's what she said)

Another annoying habit everyone does here (in French and English) is using the catch-all response, too much. Did you enjoy the party? Too much! Did you like the food? Too much! This can be used in an active sense as well – I like it too much! In French, this becomes the highly abused phrase trop meme – meaning something like 'too much, even' or to express a general 'too muchedness'. I'm not 100% if this is common, proper French, but my bullshit-o-meter doesn't believe it is, so just to be sure I NEVER say it. The word too here loses its connotation signifying an over-abundance and gets denigrated to doing the job that countless number of adjectives could take care of – Is he a good person? Oh, he's too good. How was the trip? Too fun! Would you like to shove a screwdriver through your temples now? Too much!

And one more point of contrition for me here – small. Meaning 'a little bit'. I have to go out small, I'll be right back. I want to play your guitar small. Can you give me small time, I have to make a call. Listen to me well, present and future travelers of Anglophone West Africa - if you come here and say small instead of 'a little bit', it doesn't make you integrated, it just makes you an asshole. You ever known someone who said “ciao” instead of bye or keeps their phone on military time in America just to show they've been to another country and 'oops, I still haven't gotten used to the American system after my trip'? Yeah, you're like that guy – go fall on something sharp.

Well that's it for me today. I gotta tell you, I think I've drained my hate for the day and I feel better....somehow.

Visas from Sierra Leone

2009-10-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

ETA: December 2009

Just got back from 3 days in Accra and I am now convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Togo is in all actuality, quite a shit hole. Don't get offended, I still love my little Togo like an abusive father, and the folks here are as nice as they know to be, but the difference just 3 hours away is staggering. What gave me this epiphany? Salsa dancing. I went salsa dancing. True-to-life Latin Quarter salsa dancing. On a Wednesday night. Actually there is salsa dancing somewhere in the city every night of the week, I just happened across one of the best nights to go. Huddled around a glittering deepwater pool in a classy hotel atrium, we all danced to incredible music and ate great food until midnight. The best part was the fact that it was damn near 100% Ghanaian. The white people were the ones who didn't know what the fuck they were doing - and the locals were GOOD. Good like we think of homemade vanilla ice cream on a summer day and sex on a Sunday afternoon. I have been to quite a few salsa clubs in Latin America and these guys were WORLD CLASS. I went expecting something interesting at best, and ended up being completely shocked. I couldn't help but stand there, enthralled, the ebullient smile of a smitten teenager stuck to my face the entire night. Pictures of this exist, but not on my camera - I'll get them soon and put them up, because I really feel like even you in comfy yovo-land would be impressed.

So, it was then I conceded that, yes, Ghana wins. There is a tangible difference in the air when you are in Ghana - you read headlines in one of the 10 different daily newspapers (Togo has 2, who choose their words carefully) of rapists tried and convicted beside restaurant reviews. Sure, the city is ugly as hell and almost as hot, but Ghanaians are proud of their country and think in a worldly fasion, and I can't help but see it through rose-colored shades. I mean, come on, they actually speak a proper language there - here, look at this handy visual aid -

Exhibit A: Countries where French is useful

Exhibit B: Countries where English is useful - HUZZAH!

In other news, work is going well, with my projects starting to wind down - Prosper, my zoo guy is opening a bakery in Kpalime and a Mushroom farm in Lome, and Charles is hawking gadgets across Lome like a true hustler. People are making money, and I feel a bit accomplished. So, all is well there.

This is a normal work-day for Prosper.

After the new year, I'll pretty much be out of here, with only 4 months before our COS (close of service) conference and then just a few after that before I get lost in some other forgotten corner of the globe. Yippee. Heres a random photo to send you home with.

Claude, my favorite kid on my street

Exclusivity

2009-10-16T05:59:00.002-07:00

Welcome to the club, bitches

So, yes, I did finally bend to the will of the mighty US Government. Turns out, I'm a coward. So now every time you need your fix of cynicism you're going to have to log in. Cry me a river. This was, logically, simply the next step in my dominance of the blog-o-sphere, where, just as any great restauranteur will tell you, the more popular you get, the more exclusive you become. If you are reading this, you're a part of the club. You're in. You get it. You understand what the hell I mean when I italicize haphazardly.

Exclusivity brings with it a great advantage. I can now say whatever the hell I want. Watch this - to prove my point, my favorite joke--

Q: What's the difference between your mom and a typewriter?
A: Your mom's a whore.

ZING!

Now, I will be posting some work progress here in a few days, but I want to hold off until I gather some really nice photos for everyone, so in lieu of that, I would like to address something that has been brought to my attention recently and ask everyone in the states to kindly SIT THE FUCK DOWN! What the hell is going on over there? I really try to avoid news over here, but Jesus, its made to sound like the US is ripping itself apart - let me tell you, that time you are alluding to where everything was better never existed, no one has any idea what they are talking about, no president gets it right all the time, and you are all still the fattest, richest, most privileged people on the planet! Yes, Obama won the Nobel prize, no, the world is not ending, yes, I do have to buy my homologue a steak dinner now because I didn't believe him when he told me and I made a stupid bet. Now would everyone please just go open a bottle of wine, jump into the sheets with someone nice and calm the fuck down? I swear, I leave you guys for a year or so and it all goes to shit...

So in that vein, here's to a new, unleashed Determined to Tan - now with more fucks per sentence (fps) than any other reputable news source on the planet.

Customer Service

2009-09-15T05:06:00.000-07:00

Coming from the west, we are bred to have an overly-developed sense of service and quality. This can be one of the main contributors to the fact that outside of our borders Americans can be perceived as demanding, boorish, uncultured oafs. Sure, the French are snobs, Germans androids, Dutch druggies and Brits drunkards, but those are all in their own way, sort of endearing. Our customarily accepted belief that the customer is always right and we pay only when we are satisfied is not quite held to the same gold standard throughout the rest of the world, Togo standing apart as a brilliantly blazing bastion of ever-augmenting apathy in the wide world of falling standards. This holds true regardless of the type of service rendered – if you enter someone’s establishment, your money instantly becomes their money. Lets see some examples –

Taxis – It is of absolutely no use asking if a driver actually knows the location of your destination. He will lie through his teeth to make sure that you get into his taxi, and then once he drives around for 20 minutes he will be forced into the position of having to ask other taxi drivers for directions, who, a priori, will lie to your driver. You will eventually arrive after an obscene amount of time and wrong stops, where forthwith the driver will demand through equal levels of wild gesticulation and banal excuses that you should pay him more than you agreed upon, because, mon frere, gas is expensive.

General services – Someone wash your clothes for you but rip holes in three of your shirts? C’est l’Afrique, monsieur. Fix your shoes and now they are more uncomfortable than before? C’est bien fait! Buy absolutely anything at the marché and have it break a few hours later? Du bon qualité. Anyone remember Coiffure Wait-and-See? A hair-cut this incredible doesn’t have to only be a one-time occurrence! Simply ask any street barber if they have ever cut white-hair before – if they swear on their mother’s grave that they have, you can be absolutely assured that you will receive an as-of-yet un-fathomable act of styling prestidigitation, destined to win you fame with your friends and rejection from the opposite sex! That’ll be 200CFA, monsieur.

There was a monetary exchange involved with this

Restaurants – This one goes without mentioning. Let’s not forget the Brochette Fiasco of Fall ’08. Now that was way back and my French was still a bit shaky, so I simply chalked it up to yovo-error on my part. However, well into my 2nd year here, I am now convinced beyond any reconciliation that the majority of servers who wait on you here are either idiots or just incredibly malicious, paying the white man back for colonization, one eff-ed up order at a time. Honestly, all the evidence I’ve seen points strongly to the short-bus hypothesis. Take, for example, the countless number of times I’ve been to the local cafeteria across the street from my house. I order the exact same thing every time – an egg sandwich with two eggs, mayonnaise, onions, and tomatoes. That’s 4 ingredients for anyone not following too closely – I swear on my life it is NEVER right. N-E-V-E-R. It’s especially tiring when I’m there alone and they bring me 2 sandwiches with one egg a piece. Or, my personal favorite - me, Steven, and Rayan ordering coffee at a nice-ish restaurant here. We asked the waitress if the coffee was filtered or instant – to which she assured us it was real, filtered coffee and then went on to tell us about how she makes it fresh every morning and that she herself won’t even touch the instant stuff. Satisfied, we ordered three cups. You want to take a guess at what she brought out 10 minutes later?

3 CUPS OF TEA.

I couldn't make this stuff up...

So, this leads me back to dinner two nights ago with friends Joe and Bree who were about to leave for a nice European vacation. We went to one of the nicer restaurants in Lomé, where we ordered a steak and 2 pork chops and were promptly served 3 steaks. When we sent it back (which was an absolute first for me here, by the way), instead of actually making the order right, they decided to tell us that, no, we were wrong, the blood-red flanks of charred cow in front of us were, actually, pork chops. Silly yovos….

The bastards tried to call security on us when we left without paying. Thankfully the owner arrived right as we were getting heated. What did he say? A man who’s been in the restaurant business for over 15 years and is used to the idea of customer service? And I quote - “Pork chops shouldn’t look like that.” We took the bottle of wine with us.

Yeah, whatever...

NO ONE CARES

2009-09-04T02:43:00.000-07:00

Based on a True Story

So, why would I use a public space such as this to criminalize myself? You’d think that theoretically, with the entire world having access to my writings, I would find it in my best interest to talk about what an impact I’m having here and how much good I’m doing. Hell, this can be read by future employers, girlfriends, girlfriends’ parents, senators, parole officers, etc. Why would I make myself look like such a dick all the time? Well, there’s a long answer, and a short answer – I’ll give you both since you obviously have the time, but, in the name of brevity, just in the off-case you do actually have something more pressing to attend to, the short is this –

Eat me, I can write whatever the hell I want.

Now that that’s settled, run along and get that kettle you left boiling on the stove. For those of you with a more flexible schedule, we’re gonna dig deep and root around in the psyche of everyone’s favorite adorable emigrant southerner.

First of all, maybe I was never too clear about this, but this is ENTERTAINMENT, people. I’m not fact checking and quoting reliable sources – in fact, there is so little ‘fact’ floating around on this blog that the only thing of value you could realistically think of doing with it is maybe, I don’t know, start a hunt for WMDs (zing!). No, seriously, though, real life is pretty damn boring – you wake up, you go to work, you go to sleep, maybe you cuss a few times along the way cause someone cut you off on the interstate – snooze fest – who the hell wants to read about that?

Your Life

These are real situations, real scenarios, just incredibly embellished – just like what we learn in school about Pocahontas, Christopher Columbus, The Alamo, The first moon walk, The Civil War (Thats The War of Northern Aggrestion where I come from), The Revolutionary War, Lincoln and Emancipation, etc. - its based on true events, but its been spiced up and moved around and warped a great deal to make it work for us.

Yeah, not true

The rule of numbers comes into play here as well – only interesting things seem to happen when I’m off being free and wild, the one time every few weeks that happens, so of course I’ll write about that and not the weeks of boredom. So, when I talk about drinking from sunup to sundown and doing nothing of value for weeks on end, is there a grain of truth in that? Yeah, sure, I probably had a few beers down by the beach on a Sunday afternoon and woke up late on Monday. So why so obviously overdo it? Follow me to point #2 –

NO ONE CARES. Now please, say that out loud for me. Say it one more time for good measure. Internalize that one, it will serve you for the rest of your days. No matter how interesting my life is, no matter what kind of incredible things I am doing, no matter what kind of massive mental and spiritual changes I undergo from my various travels, it doesn’t matter to anyone. Think about any movie you’ve seen where the square family shows slides from their family rafting trip to dinner guests and everyone is squirming to get out of there – ITS ONLY INTERESTING IF IT HAPPENS TO YOU. If something doesn’t directly involve the ego of the person you are talking to, 99% of the time, their eyes will glaze over after about 5 seconds of you talking about your life. How do you avoid this confectionerisation (Im making it official, Steven!) of the masses’ ocular capacities? Simple – leave ‘em laughing. Also, pictures help – everyone likes a book with pictures. No one wants to hear about the boring computer class I had or the incredible cultural exchange I had buying tomatoes in the market. However, throw in a bit of general rapscallionism, a couple shakes of banditry, and a healthy dollop of villainy and what do you have? You have the much more entertaining story of a 6’4” sunburnt white-man chain smoking his way through aisle after aisle of piss-smelling stalls, carrying a glass of scotch and cussing because he can’t find a proper tomato in this god-forsaken country full of god-forsaken shitty vegetables.

YES!

See? Pulitzer here I come. And still the post goes deeper - Onward to point #3!!!

THE MARTYR COMPLEX. I have read that there are 4 types of people who leave everything they know and move to beat-up parts of the world to do whatever the hell they do there – Mercenaries, Misfits, Missionaries, and The Broken Hearted. I have only been here for round-abouts a year, but I will stand by that one 100%. Each of us are running from something, in our own ways, but most of us no more so than anyone else back home – its just blatantly obvious with us. Everyone has their drug, it just depends on how wisely you pick your poison - cocaine habits, shopping addictions, reality TV, constantly building additions onto your house, these things can be covered up or are seen as relatively normal back chez moi. For us, however, its kinda hard to cover up vanishing for years on end to live in mud huts. I don’t know, I’ve never done cocaine, but I would guess it probably beats the mud huts some of the time, so I can’t judge too harshly. We all fall on the MMMBh scale in some way – some come here to help, some come here thinking they want to help, and some come for lack of a better idea. To this day, I get emails talking about ‘how much good’ Im doing and that I don’t have any idea how many lives I’m touching. I won’t say that’s a complete fallacy, but I want to set the record straight here and for the rest of my life – I AM NOT A DAMN MARTYR!

No.

I am here because I want to be here, because I enjoy what I do, because I’m having a blast, because I find it way more preferable to, I don’t know, being a bank teller (no offense, bank tellers, thank you for all the free suckers). My job here is business advising, which can logically lead to ‘helping’ others, but that’s a happy side-effect - anyone who says helping people is their only goal is most likely lying to you. People do what they WANT to do in EVERY situation, based on what is better for THEM. And, as a side note, I never, ever, EVER want to get lumped in the same category as missionaries here. If that means I go to the other extreme when I talk about my work here, then so be it. I won't delve into my missionary rant here, though - I’ll save that for only the truly initiated.

So there you have it – no longer any need to worry about my mental or liver-al health. And not a moment too soon, either – I’ve got a full day of hugging African children, helping elderly women cross busy streets, facilitating those Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks (again), and at 3 I’ve got my local alchemy group – I’m teaching local artisans how to turn trash they find on the street into gold bullion. And then I’ll probably get drunk.

BUSTED!

2009-08-31T06:09:00.000-07:00

Proud board member of the West African Young Professional's Club

UPDATE: Soooooooooo, turns out people read this. People like, A) My mom (see mom, I do read your emails) and B) Relatively powerful, career-ending types of people. So even though I have not been at all forced by the man, I feel I should mention that even though I've got this HUGE disclaimer over here (far right, people, far right------->) and most people really appreciate a good dose of cynical sarcasm, The United States Government was born out of blood and spirit, not satire and wit, so, in clarification, don't worry, put the pens down, no need to write your local congressman! Peace Corps does good! We have fun and change lives all at once! Yes, I did almost break my ass-bone swan diving from my bed which was partially related to a run-in with a bottle of wine, but that could've happened to anyone! Seriously people, don't worry.... maybe one day I'll write something truthful (read: boring) about the kind of work I'm doing.... I don't think it will be a record-breaker or anything, but this is the dark side of being so damn funny.

Things Break

2009-07-29T02:02:00.000-07:00

The wine was of a particularly alcoholic sort, the 14% standing out in stern, bold numbers across the back of the bottle. Stellenzicht, a shiraz, brought back to me by Rayan from South Africa. I had never heard of it, but the row of shiny stickers across the front assured me that what I was drinking was a quality bottling, having won some minor awards at some point in the past. Rayan had just spent a fairy tale 2 week vacation at the bottom tip of the continent and brought me back wine, chocolate, and season 5 of The Office. A good friend, indeed. I'm staring at the almost empty bottle right now, slowly sipping the remainder and thinking about how the more alcoholic a wine is, the faster it oxidizes to vinegar. The dregs are pretty tart. Yesterday, the bottle was full and season 5 was unwatched. 11 hours of straight viewing brought me to the season finale, took care of the chocolate, and put a large dent in the wine. I stumbled into bed near midnight and dreamt of characters from The Office.

We are told our anti-malaria meds have a few side-effects, most of which are easily manageable, the rest which are a little less manageable. Suicide is a big one, and delirium sits pretty high up there, with minor annoyances, like hair loss, seizures, depression, anxiety attacks, restricted blood flow, loss of libido, itchiness, bed-wetting, and disturbing dreams bringing up the rear. We wouldn't take them if Malaria wasn't such an SOB of a disease. Last night, I was lost in an office complex, hung out with zombie-Jim, and went on a date with Pam. Steve Carrel made an appearance somewhere and I ran someone over with my car. They died. Do I blame the malaria meds? Maybe. Half-way through my dream-date with Pam, I had to take a dream-piss. A bathroom appeared that wasn't really suited for anyone and I ending up pissing all over my pants, which woke me up, because most anytime when I'm dreaming of pissing now, I'm worried about pissing the bed. Its not so much the wet mattress or lack of sleep that bothers me, even though those aren't at all pleasant - its the shame of pissing yourself when you are damn near 30 years old – its a humbling experience.

So, good news is the bed was dry. I was able to piss in my bathroom, which I am positive is one of life's nicer pleasures. The bonus is that in my drunken torpor I remembered where my ukulele strings were, which I had been searching for for months. In the ukulele bag. Where any normal person would keep things like ukulele strings, and for sure, the one place I didn't look. Do I blame the malaria meds? Maybe. I was pleased with myself. Navigating my way back my room I almost felt like dancing, an empty bladder, the satisfaction of solving a super-sleuth mystery and the anticipation of re-stringing my uke eventually leading me to jumping back into bed with a certain gusto. I hopped up, vaulted off the foot-board and, turning in mid-air gave a little shout for joy. A bottle of good wine, season 5, uke strings, and I could sleep as late as I wanted. Things were looking pretty great for Matt.

Now, two things happened when I missed the bed. I broke my iPod, which was resting beside my bed and on which I landed squarely on top of, and I broke my coccyx, which was resting at the base of my spine and was rammed into a solid slab of concrete as I fell 5ft solidly on my ass. I couldn't really move for a long while. It felt like my legs had fallen asleep and were being beaten with sandpaper-covered mallets as they were waking up. If I was a horse someone would have given me the nicest apple they could've found and then shot me in a pasture. So, just to let everyone know, I'm positive that Africa is going to kill me. Do I blame the malaria meds? Maybe. Do I want to leave? Nah.

President's Get to Have All the Fun

2009-07-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

Had the opportunity to sneak over to Accra and see President Obama Saturday. He spoke at the airport for about 15 minutes and then took off to be fresh and new in Washington on Sunday. Its not the first time that I've been to a speech of his, but this one was special because A) Im in Peace Corps, which gave us a special place we could stand right up front and B) Its freaking West Africa – All in all I can count about 8 hours of travel and waiting just to see this cat for a few minutes. I was at the border by 6am, greeted by a light drizzle and a street pastor screaming verses at us in Ewe. 10 minutes after 6 the wooden slats that the 'gate' consisted off were slid to the side and a shit-show ensued of people pushing, cussing, and running as quickly as they could to be the first to cheap transport on the Ghanaian side. I was about 15 people back, watching the guards dishing out 5-finger hooker slaps to young guys trying to sneak past them (I could hear the slaps...ouch). Now I've been here a while and I try as much as possible not to abuse the whiteness. I live cheaply, I say Im half Togolese – hell, I've been able to cross the border without doing paperwork just by showing my residence permit, which hardly any whitey has. However, with rain encroaching and my patience waning, I played my trump card - I held my passport straight up in the air and as soon as the guard saw that blue-bound-beauty he pulled me to the front and let me through.

America: 1 Africa: 0

I changed money, found a bus and was on my way in faster time than it normally takes me to fill out paperwork because I showed my passport to any guard blocking my way and looked like I had somewhere to be.

3 hours in the tro brought me to Accra where traffic was horrendous, nearly gridlocked the entire way from the outskirts to downtown. I met up with friends, got the embassy where I finagled a ticket for myself by insisting that Peace Corps volunteers, no matter their country, should be able to go (truthfully it was only for Ghanaian volunteers, but hell, I live closer to Accra than the majority of them). Taxis, buses, lines, waiting, security checks, metal detectors and more lines and I finally got to the tarmac. The tarmac where we waited for another 3 hours until he arrived. With all this time to pass, it was interesting to watch all the official-looking people running around fixing things and arranging everything perfectly for the speech - I watched, I swear to god, the two biggest, meanest looking mofos wearing black suits with guns strapped to their waists spend 20 minutes clipping a tag from on of the flags so it wouldn't show on camera – I expected them to like, drop kick something and bench press the podium - a bit surreal. It was a dramatic scene with Air Force One looming in the distance, more suits running in and out, letting us catch glimpses of the interior. Obama showed up by helicopter from Cape Coast, the old slave fort, said his bit, and then took off. He seemed exhausted, which, considering he'd been in something like 6 time zones in 3 days, is expected. He did praise the PCVs there for all their 'outstanding' work that we are doing. And you know what? He's right - we should be thanked. Im frigging incredible.

Was it worth it? If you've been sticking with me for a while, then you'll know that worth is quite the relative term – however, looking back, yeah, it was worth it – Im always appreciative of a good story. And you know, seeing all that organization and official scurrying-about of everyone almost made me envious of folks with titles and money and power and all that. Almost, you know. Sleeping late on weekdays is still nice, too.

Im a Badass

2009-07-02T02:31:00.000-07:00

I am aware that possibly no one will have any idea what these are about, but Im putting 'em up anyway - from Street Fighter 3. Undeniable proof of my near deity-like power. And you guys thought my college education was going to waste!

Standards and Practices

2009-06-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

How do you judge someone's worth? (and yes, I'm quite aware of the painful cliché that is starting a discourse with a nebulous, quasi-rhetorical question. eat me.) Is everyone worth the same as everyone else? If my five beans are black and your five beans are white are they equal to each other? (The black beans are bigger, the white beans look great in flannel, it cancels out) I'm sure all of you reading would say yes, one human life is just as valuable as another, but then again, most of you are white American Christians, so that needs to be taken with a large crunchy bit of sea-salt. Our WASP-y world view leaves room for plenty of conscience-free judgment. We have newer cars and larger houses, pristine lawns and ridiculous business cards. Even our ironically oft-trumpeted modesty more often than not just ends up being a sickening version of sycophantic vanity tailored for the religious crowd. Even those that never ended up with the women, money, or fame have their own hat tricks when it comes to self-evaluation (read: self-inflation) – we call em 'scruples' -

Scruples

they may not be rich, but by god, they always stayed true to themselves and a man's word is worth all the money in the world. (Actually, its not, thats stupid as hell, but some people need this kind of crap to sleep at night) Tied up in all of that are multitudinous ways to judge someones value. Now me, I come from the deep south - I like my tea sweet and my women sweeter. I have a cute accent and know how to say yes sir and yes ma'am. Down where I'm from we identify with the hard-working farm boy, the every-man, the Joe Plumbers out there. We even have a word for everyone that doesn't belong with us – 'elite'. If you are too rich, too educated, too worldly, or in general can in any fashion make us feel inadequate, you should go-back-to-where-you-came-from-right-the-fuck-now-and-
dont-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out. We will in no way vote for someone smarter, more charismatic or better qualified than us for any position of power in what has to be one of the most brilliant failures of common sense, ever.

To get back on track, what do we use every day to silently judge someone's value in relation to us? Well, for starters there's money. Everyone loves money, right? Leaving the states over a year ago, lots of people balked at the idea of coming here because I could have just stayed in the states and made money. (As a quick aside, do you know what the US has? Answer: Everything.)

Exhibit A: Everything

And looked at from across the pond, we make absolute jack nill – what could you do with $250 a month? Not a lot, thats what. However, conversely, we live like gods here, being paid around 10 times what Kossi Q. Publique makes here in a month. Still with me? Lets look at education – the vast majority of us here have a simple bachelors degree, what has become in the states more a rite of passage than an accomplishment. Everyone goes to college, and it means absolutely nothing anymore – so, again, from the states, no big deal – we've proved we can fill in bubbles with #2 pencils in between hangovers and frisbee-golf. Yet here, we are looked at as 'professionals', 'experts', and 'consultants' – folks here fight their whole lives to get a degree from a university that would be laughed at on any other continent. What about the importance of your job? I've seen women who stalk lawyer bars and med-school libraries to try and find a rich man. We call that a 'pre-wed' degree. Viewed from the states it looks like we sit around and suck on the massive US taxpayer-teat, whereas here we all know the truth – were promoting cultural exchange and building capacity. Its almost like saving babies and being productive, just different.

Me, last Tuesday

Well, the whole point of my diatribe today is that I've hit another wall here. Peace Corps has plenty of people across the board who would like to see it disbanded – they argue its a bloated, unproductive, nigh-useless organization. Peace Corps, in beautiful shades of Darwinian self-preservation, argues the exact opposite – we A) have a major impact on a grass-roots level where other organizations don't reach and B) we promote better understanding of American peoples and culture throughout the world while enriching our own lives. Even though I'm a miserable curr 99% of the time, I have to agree that we do work in places where other groups don't go, and we have a much more lasting effect. However I'm starting to put some pieces into place in my head and some bits aren't adding up. And it all comes back to value and worth.

Now, hypothetically lets say my name is Marcus and I work for a completely fictitious organization called the Corps of Peace. I'm a surgeon working in a developing nation getting paid next to nothing, my opportunity cost just for being out of the US alone damn near able to pay off the country's external debt. Now I am contractually bound by CP to take medicines that will prevent various ailments found where I'm working. I have known that from the first day I set foot in the country that were I to ever not take the meds, I would be sent home. Fair enough, right? Well now lets say that I am very sick for two days and can keep no food or liquids down. Hey, it happens. The unfortunate corollary to this is that I can't take meds for two days until I can start to hold anything in my stomach. Then, lo and behold, hot damn, I get the sickness that the meds were there to prevent in that very two day window when my immune system was already beaten up. Where do you think this is going? Im going to get released because I didn't take my meds, right? Right?

Actually, no. What I'm doing in the country far outweighs the silly fact that I threw up two days of meds out of over a year's worth and then got sick. It's unfortunate, but it would be such a waste to send me home and leave all of my work here unfinished. And why would I be kept in country after I technically broke regs? Because I am worth more than the inconvenience of a bit of medical treatment and maybe a stern talking to about what to do the next time I'm losing the lining of my stomach to the rich African soil. Lesson learned, I go back to work doing what I came to do. But, that is the Corps of Peace and we are the Peace Corps, and let me tell you, its not just the name thats different – we're actually serious when we say we will kick you out. Whether intentional or not, you broke contract. We're bad ass, and we will punish you. Now go back to the land of cheesecake and bacon and think hard about what you did while you take a hot shower.

That'll teach em

Is it because we aren't worth forgiving a technicality? Or is it because what we do here really isn't worth as much as I'm making it out to be. Hmmm.... Maybe I should ask some of the PC big-dogs, the folks that have worked here for decades and have their retirements and 401ks coming soon, if they would pay me out of their own pocket for what I'm doing. Those dedicated people who, over the years, have seen what good PC can do and believes in it 100%, enough so to devote their lives working for the organization - I wonder if they would write me a personal check. I'm beginning to guess no. I wonder if any of us would be worth it...

Nothing of Interest

2009-06-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

Matt likes poker. He may have a problem.

More than a month has passed, by far my longest spate of absenteeism since this little guy's inception. And for this month I have little by way of witty musings to show, but I do have some photos. Steven, my Monde-Touring Dutch compadre just finished up an 8 month journey through the outback, New Zealand, and Asia by flying into my humble abode, so for lack of something better, Ill throw up some witty captions underneath the photo narrative of his sejour here. Hey, no one hits homers every at-bat - cut me some slack.

Street race / bike show, Accra

We found a zoo. In Lome.

A Tiger Cat. Seriously, lookit that thing. BadAss.

Big Offshore made big waves in Aneho.

Come to think of it, we didn't really do too much... drinking, sleeping, eating. Maybe I can do some work now...

Yippee

Bush Existentialism

2009-04-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

Language is the manifestation of a culture. Everyone has heard that language is 'alive', 'growing', or 'adapting' - an entity that is dynamic and evolving with the years. George Orwell understood this and made it a central theme in "1984" - ingsoc, doublethink and newspeak were invented to reduce the language to concise, specific words, limiting the ability to think about abstract concepts by erasing the means to express them. To find what a people hold dear, simply look at their most important adages or, maybe even more importantly, their most important curses. We've all heard how Inuits have '(insert-number-here)' words for 'snow' and then again just as many for 'ice'. When their lives depend on knowing the exact state of their environment, these are not just vital words, but extensions of their awareness they depend on for survival. For all of us coming from the Western world, its a bit harder to come up with ethno-centric terms, but they are there. I have searched through every other romance language plus Arabic and a few African tongues, and there is no direct translation for 'jilting'. Now what does it say about us as a people when we have a word for leaving someone at the altar when no one else does? Arabic has over 600 words for both 'sword' and 'god'. The Dutch have 'zwafflen', which I will not translate for the public, but, believe me, is absolutely side splitting and 'gezellig', the feeling of 'pigs in a pen' - cozy. The land of windmills and legal prostitution lacks, oddly enough, a word for 'sibling'. Portuguese, by far the winner of sexiest language on the face of the planet, has so many sex-based words I wish I had been born Brazilian - one of striking sweetness - 'Cafuné' - to run your hands tenderly through someones hair - and another of a special longing for something real or imagined - 'Saudade', a word that permeates the lives of Cape Verdeans. Think of the stolen words - 'siesta' and 'deja vu' - we know what they mean, but they both must be explained - a mid-day nap, for the Spaniards, and the feeling of having already lived through something, from the French. The Frenchies bring many fun ones to the table - 'tutoyer' - to eye someone scornfully, or (and this one is true for many countries) 'beeper' - to call someone and let it ring once then hang up so they call you back. Just to let you know, I LOATHE it when people beep me. HATE IT.

So where am I leading you this time around? We're going to jump over to Ewe, the local language here in the south that stretches from Benin to Ghana. Ewe, like many indigenous languages has a few quirks about it that we westerners find odd - there are no verb conjugations and only a few proper tenses - in Ewe you can eat something (present and past at the same time) - "me du nu", you can be eating something (present progressive) - "me le du nu", and, by using 'to go' to bridge the gap - I am going to eat - "me dza du nu". Now, if you've been following what I've been laying out for you here the past few months, you'll remember how the perception of time here is stretched quite far here - I'm guessing that is, in a large part, because of the constructs of the language. I'm over-simplifying when I say this (though not by much), but the common ways of expressing time are summed up in two words in Ewe - 'today' (egbe) and 'not today' (Etso) - meaning both 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. Now, of course, there are ways to express long periods of time, but it is important to point out that the most fundamental and common units of time are 'today' and 'everything else'. Think about that - In a place where there are only two seasons - dry and wet, one temperature and a lack of time-telling constructs in the language, how are we to bring about lasting change? Words like long-term become laughable when people focus only on eating today and leaving everything else until etso. How do you convince a horny 20 year old to choose between buying food or condoms, when hunger is real and now and AIDS is something that could kill you etso? How do you change long-held beliefs on the treatment of women and children, growing crops, or saving money when this is way things have always been done and you are just a happy-go-lucky baby-huggin yovo who is here egbe and gone etso?

I don't know, folks, I really don't know. There is, however, no word for 'boredom' in Ewe, nor is there much of a distinct difference between 'work' and 'living'. On top of that, there are lots of words for 'happy'. Maybe that should tell us something...

Ma Petite Raison d'Etre

2009-04-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

I drank a mojito today for lunch. It cost me 4mil (4000CFA). Thats 8 dollars. I walked into the most expensive bar in Lome and spent 8 dollars on rum and mint and limes. Normally I spend 500 francs on food for the entire day. And that, my friends is the contradiction of my job. Yesterday I got in a shouting match with two taxi drivers because they tried to charge me 50 cents too much and today I spent a weeks worth of pay on a cocktail. At lunch. No, instead of lunch. Part of me says I should feel guilty for doing this in Togo, one of the poorest countries in the world, where a normal wage is 28,000CFA a month ($60). Its the same part of me I tricked into believing that I joined the Peace Corps to do some good in the world. To help people. To ease suffering and have a purpose to my life. Now, however, I'm pretty sure that I joined the Peace Corps because I had nothing better to do and was terrified of the real world. How do I know this?

Because the other part of me sat there and ordered a second one. And I don't feel guilty at all.

The 3 People You Meet in Hell

2009-04-14T04:49:00.000-07:00

Just another day

Einstein is credited with summing up the theory of relativity in one succinct analogy - “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.” This has come to light here in Togo in broader ways that I first noticed. Not that I've been running around high fiving grills or chasing skirts relentlessly (although I never said I didnt WANT to chase a skirt...c'mon universe, throw me a damn bone here), but time seems to have taken on a different personality here. There are times, sitting at home, having already paced the path from my kitchen to the living room to the porch, sweeping neurotically along the way, that I start planning the rest of my day just to waste daylight hours so I can make it to dinner. Other days, days filled with beaches and travelling and laughter slide by much too quickly. Like a broken accordion, the temporal standards here move in and out, incredibly slow periods seeming like nothing in retrospect.

Any where I've travelled that is A) Tropical(ish) and B) Generally poor, where the local folks yearn for something more have two things in common – 1) They're big into Che Guevara Tshirts and Bob Marley music and 2) they all have a relaxed view of time. Things here a different from what we are used to. Folks here run on a dearth of stimuli. Sitting is important here. Talking – about nothing in particular – is something like an art form. Being quiet takes a precedence as the sun falls. Things take (you guessed it), time. Little things – taking showers, 2 hour taxi rides that are only that long in theory, meals, washing or drying clothes. The meeting you set at 3pm wont start until 4:30 because people were 'busy'. L'heure Africain predominates just about every single interaction or transaction you decide to attempt. So, coming from the western world, where not looking at a clock or a mirror for more than 5 minute spans can induce fits of rage and spasms, it is easy for me to tell you who holds all of the power here – those that control your time. These 3 groups of fine gentlemen (and women) can have your balls in a vice within the blink of an eye – (the corollary to this being they are the happiest groups here) -

1. Government officials – Ever been cruising down the interstate, listening to your favorite David Hasselhoff mixed tape, just to have some jerk-off in a beamer come tearing around you going 30 over, chucking burger wrappers out the window, nearly running you off the road? And you start to cuss, and I know what you are thinking – damn broads – but no, wait, is that a Government tag there? You'd bet your bottom dollar on it – So imagine that scene here, only (now stay with me) you are walking, with 22 lbs of yams on your head and a baby strapped to your back, on your 3^rd of 6 miles from village and that jerk-off is just the same except overfed, overpaid, and driving one of the ONLY beamers in country. Welcome to West Africa – where your perceived power is directly proportional to how incredibly overweight you are and where your actual power is indirectly proportional to how long you routinely force the populous to wait to fill out even the most mundane of paperwork - “My, my, govn'uh, you're looking splendid today! Are those new pants? You had to buy larger ones, yeah? My you've gained quite a lot of....wealth. Whats that? I need to sit down over here? But all I need is a form. No, the one right there – beside your hand. I mean, I can see it. Look, its not like you even have to really do anything. Just grab it for me. No, little more to the left, little more, no, too far, YES, thats the one. What? You need to get permission to give it to me? But there's like, a hundred of them just laying there.” The DMV is a playground compared to any governmental office here.

2. Gendarmes – Police. Keeping the population safe and secure by harassing whitey and fleecing taxi drivers. I must have missed the part in school where they teach you that a cold-war era rusting AK-47 slung backwards over your shoulder is your be-a-total-dick-to-anyone-you-please card. Believe me, gendarmes here go from 6 to midnight when they see a taxi full of yovos coming their way (If I have to explain it, you don't need to know what it means). “Whats that driver? You have 2 yovos in the back there? Well then I'm sure God has blessed you and you can bribe me with an even larger sum today than you did yesterday for me to not fine you for this... um... *crack* broken taillight here.” I have had a truck full of gendarmes come to a screeching stop in front of me as I was waiting to cross the road to ask me for my papers. ...TO ASK ME FOR MY FUCKING PAPERS - what is this, East Germany? Who the hell asks for papers anymore? Am I gun-running in the easter-bloc? “I'm very aware that my sloping brow and protruding lower jaw give me the air of the common criminal, but my fine sir, I'm doing nothing but standing on the side of the road. Yes, thank you for informing me that there is no common indicator of a criminal mind and that you must be vigilant. No, actually, I don't have my passport on me. Um, well sir I wasn't aware this was a police-state. Sir, you do see that there's like 5 other people standing around me, right? Yes, I'm sure this is a completely random stop. The way you swerved and left tire tracks as you braked was a sure-fire indicator of that. Where do I come from? I'm American. No, I'm not French. Oh, so you don't need to fine me now? You know, for standing? On a sidewalk? Oh, ok, well, yeah, see you later, boss.”

We May Never Know...

3. Bank tellers – The cream of the crop, the brightest bulb in the pack, the top of their class, and by far the largest tools of any shed I know of, the lowly bank teller that normally greets you with a smile and asks about your kids in the states regards you with nothing more than the most vehement of disdain here. My eyes were truly opened to this when I began to question why I was always bringing a Russian novel with me whenever I needed to go banking.

Dostoyevsky comes highly recommended

Anyone out there remember The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld? Yeah, Imagine that, except instead of getting kicked out, you're never able to leave. You'll be forced to live in a waiting-room hell. They know you need your money. They know they have you. Did their favorite soccer team lose last night? Heaven have mercy on you, my child – you won't make it out before dark. And heaven forbid you ask for them to give you some small bills instead of 10mil notes – imagine paying for bubble gum with a $100 bill in the states – do you know how useful a 10mil note is here? You might as well try and buy a steak dinner with your vintage PEZ dispenser collection – ITS ONLY WORTH SOMETHING IN THEORY. There's also a good chance you are standing in the wrong line. Sure, its the same line you've always stood in, but you know what? Its the wrong one. “No sir, just go down there *points* and they'll take care of it. *Looks to the left* Down there? Down where? Ma'am, all you did was vaguely motion to the left. Down there, sir. They'll help you. *Looks again* Yeah, look, you just pointed at Benin, could you give me a little more to go on than that?”

You wanna know the redeeming factor in all this? I saw a gendarme standing in a line at the bank the other day. Yeah, eat it.

Pant Suits and Pakistani Drupes

2009-03-10T05:53:00.000-07:00

So, fire one - what do an African footballer, Ellis Island, and my future ex-wife(s) all have in common?

Boredom.

Its been a few slow weeks here in the tropics - I had a stint in Ghana and picked up some sort of Ghanaian death bug that has swollen my throat closed for nearly 3 weeks now. No white dots, no inflamed tonsils. I've been told its a virus. Drink hot tea. Here's some ibuprofen, call us if you have breathing problems. Yeah, call us if you are having trouble breathing, I'll be the first to let you know. Although unabated-swole-throat is a *minor* condition that only stops me from talking or eating, I've taken this opportunity to do absolutely nothing resembling work for almost 2 weeks and blame it on the malady.

You should really stop cussing me through the screen - jealousy isn't becoming of you.

So, being that I had an improptu vacation, I had to somehow fill my time with something that didn't involve drinking and ranting. This was daunting, daunting indeed.

Enter Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. SVU. Ess Vee Fucking You.

This is the stuff dreams are made of. A rough and tumble group of dedicated detectives solving sexually based crimes throughout the boroughs of NYC. Do I like NYC? Well yeah, sure, why not, I hear the pizza is excellent. Do I like sex? Hell yeah, getting warmer. Oh yeah, well how about ex-rappers and intense Asians kicking pedophilic ass? Yeah? Yeah? DAMN STRAIGHT, NOW WE'RE TALKIN!

Ex cop killer Ice-T, Ex funny man Richard Belzer, Ex drunk Dann Florek, Ex Marine Christopher Meloni, Ex wives Mariska Hargitay and Diane Neal and Asian par exellence BD Wong, who I didn't have anything funny to write about, but who's expression is so serious you'd better believe he's got a lot of ass to kick and the day ain't gettin any younger, you know?

There is nothing flashy here, folks. We're talking minimalistic camerawork dictated by intense pacing and a gritty motif right out of 1986. I could write a novel about the numerous strengths of this show, spending the first 7 or so chapters on any scene involving Mariska Hargitay, with a special nod to any scenes involving Mariska Hargitay running, and then the next chapter or so on the dearth of scenes involving Mariska Hargitay running.

No, they're not doing it, but if there's anything that's going to keep me praying, this is it.

I sometimes find myself waking up from my mid-day nap around 2:30 and wondering what to do until dinner time. In comes about 5 episodes of SVU, laying across my couch wearing nothing but pagne pants and a contented smile and then its off to eat a yam or two. And the months keep passing by... Seriously, though, whoever does the casting for this show is an unsung hero - mixing rappers with minorities, ex-military strongmen with independent, successful, pant-suit wearing models and everyone has guns and drop-kicks men who touch little boys. I'll be damned if that isn't some kind of satisfying.

The last thing you see before you die

Diane Neal, I would love to break up with you one day.

Now were going to change gears here and learn about the Togolese superstar and my close neighbor, Emmanuel Adebayor.

Exhibit A: The face that launched a thousand shots

Adebayor is a living legend here in Togo, born in Lome 24 years ago, he is the quintessential rags-to-riches story, rising from the slums of Togo at a young age to become the star striker for Arsenal. (If you don't know what Arsenal is, don't feel bad, I had to google 'striker') I have heard many, many stories of his unending wealth and omnipresent power from locals who all know him personally - some of his well-known feats-

- He was born in Ghana, but became Togolese after deciding that being Ghanaian would be too 'easy'

- His grandfather lived to be 130 years old. This is why Adebayor is so strong. Duh.

- Adebayor has sired 105 children.

- He speaks Mandarin Chinese

- He is near 7ft tall (a line was drawn over my 6'4" height - "Are you sure he's that tall?" I asked. "Yes," the cafeteria owner told me. "He's very tall. Too tall.")

- He likes coconuts.

- He can fly.

Exhibit B: Adebayor in mid-flight

So what ties all of this together?? A Togolese superstar (foot)balling out of control and a popular syndicated American crime drama? Freedom, my friends, freedom.

Adebayor's house. Wait for it... wait for it...

BOO YAH!

Its a Statue of Liberty with a damn soccer ball on it - her vigilant eye keeping watch over the tired, huddled masses that constitutes pretty much every Togolese I've ever met... these folks are tough. Look at it one more time, make sure you take in all of its resplendent glory. This is Adebayor's house, which is 5 minutes around the corner from mine. Only in West Africa does this make any type of sense. God, I love this place.

Well, anyway, I gotta get out of here - Adebayor just contacted me with his mind powers and wants us to take his rocket car to Islamabad for a long weekend. I didn't know this, but the dude loves cricket. And apparently Pakistani coconuts aren't all that bad.

Dear George Lucas

2009-02-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

Dear George,

I guess I just need to say what I need to say and be done with it. I've tried to start this letter a number of times, but keep erasing it all, trying to find the right words - I just want to be sure that I get this right. We've been through so much together, you and me and all my money, haven't we? I've been needing to talk to you for so long, but you've been so busy for the past 10 years making those 'movies' and counting all of my money (do you still swim naked through your vault like you loved to do?) and I got caught up with puberty and finding college kids to buy me alcohol and light petting and it just never seemed like the right time. Maybe if I had been braver, came to you with my concerns when they first arose we wouldn't be at this point. So, for that, I blame myself... but then again, we've never been too good at really talking to one another, have we? It's all seemed so one sided... I always feel like I've been sitting in the dark for hours while you told me the same stories over and over again. Well now look at us, after all these years and I don't even recognize you anymore.

The good ole days

I began to get worried way back in 83 with Return of the Jedi... Empire was so good and Reagan was in office and we were all flying high on love and the bull market. You knew the expectations were high, but you were so confident and sure of yourself that I fell under your spell for a third time. And you know what, George Lucas? You did it. The movie was great - critically acclaimed, moving, compassionate, lots of shit blowing up - I couldn't have asked for more, but looking back now, I can see where it began.

Yes. Fuck yes.

No - The first sign

But then, we started drifiting apart. Those few years after Jedi, well, there were some soul-searching quiet moments there, weren't there? I didn't hear from you much, but I was always there, waiting for when you'd let me back in. I knew you still cared for me, my parents always paid for the shipping on those Star Wars figures you kept sending me, and I knew when the time was right we'd be back together. Then, in 1986 Christmas came early. Or so I thought. You didn't send lightsabers and Millennium Falcons and a galactic struggle between good and evil. I know Harrison was away working on other projects, but, George Lucas, and I say this with nothing but love for you - what the fuck, man? 3 years of silence and you try to make up for it with Howard the Duck?

....seriously?

As the technology kept getting more advanced you let your imagination run wild. I stood by your side the whole time, George Lucas. When you wanted to print some more money and remade the trilogy? I was right there with you and sat through them all again, feeling like we were making our way back to where we once were. Even though you tried to gay-up Han Solo, I let it slide as mid-life liberal remorse for a gentler world.

Un-Gayable

And things were good for a time - I hit a rough patch and had to sell all of the figures you sent me through the years to pay for my first year of school, but I still had you, and you had my money and it was like 1977 all over again.

But let me get down to brass tax here, George Lucas, you know I've never minced my words --- things didn't last. The build-up to the prequels was unfathomable, the hopes and aspirations and dreams of our future together riding the wave of fanboys' wet dreams all over the world and all you had to do was do the same thing you did 20 years earlier. We're not talking a high dive or flying trapeze or a 50 year old running a marathon. All you had to do was tell the same story in the same way, and everything would have been ok. All you had to do George Lucas, was flash some lightsabers, cut up some aliens and show some shit levitating. And this is what I got.

Why?

I know that you and me weren't talking at the time, but was there no one you could run that one by? Did you let anyone read the script? Was it something I said? I guess you can see where this is going now. Over the next 6 years you threw shitty movie after shitty movie at me, expecting your old confidence and flannely-aloofness to charm me as it used to. But its just not enough anymore, George Lucas. We've changed, you, and me, and my wallet. Gone are the days when it will just open its bi-fold for you anytime you feel frisky. I need something more than a mere shadow of what we once had -- I need the real deal - I need a Darth Vader thats evil because he's a fucking bad-ass, not because he's a whiny 20 year-old with a crush. I need a hot heroine who will strip down, not put on makeup with a paint-roller. I need a rough-around-the-edges smuggler type who's willing to gamble everything for the girl. I need a Boba Fett that isn't the unadulterated brother of every storm trooper in the galaxy. I need Jedi who don't lay down and die when an old man jumps over a table at them. God, George Lucas, I don't even know what more I can say.

But just when I thought you had hit rock bottom, when I thought there was no possible way you could screw the pooch any worse, you pulled the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen you do. On the darkest day, in the remotest, coldest corner of hell, I suppose I could defend Jar Jar if I was really put upon. But in no way could I ever conceive how you could possibly consider this a proper move in our relationship. Worse than the time you whored out the franchise for the Holiday Special, worse than the Ewoks spin-off, and even worse than the idea that Anakin Skywalker crafted C-3PO himself, you went and outdid everything I thought you capable of -- I hope you're not playing stupid, George Lucas, you know exactly what I'm talking about--

Put em together and what do you get?

Ziro the Hutt. Or Truman Capote. I still can't tell.

A quarter century and 4 billion dollars later and the best you can come up with is a transexual-ish gay slug? What the hell, George? Can you name one character you've created in the past 25 years who hasn't sucked ass? Mace Windu (Samuel L Jackson? SERIOUSLY)? Count Dooku? If I can give you anything for when you walk away, its this - FILM A MOVIE WITHOUT CG AND IT MIGHT NOT MAKE SOME PART OF ME DIE. So, George Lucas, I just want you to know that we are done and I'm over you and I don't want you calling anymore or writing me or sending me your catalogues or trying to convince me that R2 can fly because we all no that makes no goddamn sense. I don't want us to forget the good times we had, but seriously, we're done now. I can't put myself through this anymore. So please, don't try to contact me or my money, we don't want to talk to you.

Until you make a Ziro the Hutt figure. I'll probably still buy that.

Ceci n'est pas une feuille vide

2009-02-02T04:39:00.000-08:00

Or is it?

Just got back from a week in Pagala, near the center of the country, where my stage had IST (in service training). It was, in a very boring, bureaucratic way, one of the most surreal things I've done here. Take, for instance, this blurb from some training material -

Read the following phrases and say if they concern some projects-

2) A young man wants to visit his friend in the neighboring village. Early in the morning, he smokes some manioc tubers, puts them in his bag, takes his machete and leaves. Arriving at the village of his friend, he is informed that his friend went fishing. he takes the road and returns to his house.

...what?

(also, i can't turn off italics now. blast)

We decided to think of a few things more fun than IST - here, in abridged form

- Pinochle
- Orthodox church service
- Drinking urine
- Rolling in an ant hill after a sugar-water bath
- Ethnomusicology exam
- Death of a relative
- Special Olympics Curling Championships
- Dodging javelins

*sigh*
So, I've got fancy places to be coming up right soon, so I'll leave you with a bit of Lebanese-American wisdom-

"Hey man, why'd you have to piss in their oatmeal? Let them smoke their oregano."

No truer words have ever been spoken... well said... well said, indeed.

The Face of Apathy

2009-01-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

Sent to me by Rayan. I wasn't even aware he took these -- I call it 'A Study on Waiting' -- enjoy

Waiting on the taxi to leave the Parakou Gare

Crossing the Niger River

Waiting to leave Niamey

Niamey, again. Ponctualite, my ass.

By Popular Demand

2009-01-09T05:12:00.000-08:00

You know, I always like books with pictures more than the others, so for all of you geographically challenged and visually stimulated folks out there heres the Sahelian-taxi-crawl-travel-companion----

It gets bigger if you click on it (thats what she said)

Yellow dots are where I stayed - it all added up to over 2000 miles (I calculated that from km. In my head. I have lots of hidden talents.)

On Mountains, Rodents, and Bowling

2009-01-08T05:41:00.000-08:00

What began as a fantasy trip venturing to the mountains of Agou and then heading up north for Christmas celebrations, visiting family and friends with the wishes of snow-covered peaks and dreams of fat men and dancing fruit quickly met with the realities of the tropical West African climate and the logistical beast that is impromptu-dirt-road-cross-country travel. I left my dear Lome in mid-December, shirking responsibilities by flagging a taxi out of town. What ensued for the next 3 weeks was an alcohol fueled romp plumbing the depths of discomfort across 4 countries. I found myself, (in rough order) charming the yovophobic children of Koudassi while visiting a good friend for lunch, resting in the highest village in Togo, Dzigbe, sitting nearly at the top of Mount Agou, looking out over the valley where we lived for 3 months in stage,

Dzigbe

relaxing in Atakpame, listening to Scottish-bagpipe-techno (the first time I had heard that genre), the smell of honeysuckle floating through the air from the rolling hills surrounding the town. After a quick overnight in Pagala, I shot up to Niamtougou where home-made eggnog and beef kebabs floated us through the Christmas like the lilting piano runs of the Vince Guaraldi record we had flowing from the speakers of Rayan's computer. After 3 days of Xmas fete-ing we cleaned the house, returned the rented plastic chairs and got a taxi out of town. Rayan, Marcus and I left for Kara, where they awoke to the sight of me chasing rats the size of my forearm around the living room with a machete at 3am, counting the minutes until we could leave for the border.

The Three Brushketeers

From this point we truly began to delve deep into the depths of painful travel, with moto rides through dust storms (I got a bandana starting day 2), disintegrating Peugeots and the occasional donkey, going 12 hours of road time to the border of Niger, collapsing into bed at 11pm after running over 231 potholes (we were in the damn taxi for 7 hours, we had to do something) and eating a dinner of Thai-neon-orange-drink (with 25% real fruit!) and a hazelnut chocolate bar (you find the weirdest things in border towns). The next day found us gambling in a straw hut over the border in Niger at the Gaya bus station waiting for transport to Niamey.

Gambling is a sin in lots of religions. We're angering many gods at once here.

Yeah, your guess is as good as mine... they were chewy

I threw sheckels I had found in my bag from my trip to Israel at local Muslims. We drank curdled coconut milk (yeah, they weren't real pieces of coconut) and ate as much meat as we could stuff into our mouths at once. Nigerians are an exceedingly warm, honest, and amicable bunch and the rough ride to Niamey was mitigated a bit by actually being quoted the correct price for the bush-taxi ride. We watched the Nigerian countryside whip past as we made our way to the capital throughout the day. As an aside here, we were beginning to see a pattern at every border we crossed –
- Passport agent asks for passports, thinking we are French.
- Sees American passport, smiles broadly and says something about the 'Republic of Obama.'
- We smile and nod fervently.
- They cheer and stamp passports with no questions asked.
- Everyone gives three Huzzahs for democracy.

I still love tea

They even put the stamps in there all neat and side-by-side. I've been to some places where I swear they intentionally put on stamp diagonally across an entire page just to make sure you understand how apathetic they are to you, your travels, your opinion and ultimately their job. No one says “I want to be a border agent when I grow up,” right? So, thank you future president of the United States, you saved me many many CFA in bribes to get across borders scot-free (In your FACE, Sarcozy!)

The next 6 days are spent in bars, outside of bars, in restaurants, outside of restaurants, in and out of beds and hot (!!!) showers. New Years eve we danced while video of Gaza being bombed flashed across the screens of the bar. We watched fireworks from the 5th story roof of a building after seeing someone with us slice his head open on a broken beer bottle (he didn't die. The amount of blood lost would convince you otherwise). We cursed life in the morning. Thank god we decided to take a bus on the 2nd, not the 1st. Our last day in Niger was spent drinking lots of water and watching awful movies.

Grand Mosquee, Niamey

The next morning, after sleeping for only 3 hours and hiring a car at an exorbitant price to take us to the bus station at 4am, our bus to Ouagadougou (no matter how many times I say it, its still fun) was 4 hours late and 5 seats too small. Our chère bus line had three tenets of satisfaction plastered across every cracking wall of their building-

Ponctualité – scheduled to leave at 5:30. Left at 9.
Confort – My knees still hurt. The lucky passengers got a cooler to sit on in the aisle.
Sécurité – Bus was a soviet-era Russian diesel bucket. Windshield had been shattered and repaired more times than we could count. Held together with discolored glue.

10 hours later with the beginnings of arthritis and hemorrhoids we find the capital of Burkina. Hell, at this point I don't even remember what we did there. I must have slept the next three days. I know I ate a breakfast sandwich made of sour meat and arteries and danced with tons of hookers until 4am at some point. After all of this, we met some folks heading down to Lome and decided to cut the trip 5 days short to escort them back down to the coast. I've been showing them around the past few days and man, do I love this city. Sure, its a bit like a truck stop, but I can get 25% fruit juice from Thailand anytime of the day and my bowling game was getting a little rusty.

Yeah, thats my house. We established my level of bad-assery long ago – this should come as no surprise.

Its a good thing we're back, too --- do you know what its like up in the Sahel during Harmattan? My lips cracked like the surface of mars and my nose bled every day. I have no clue how people adjust to dry climates. I've finally come to terms with it -- I love hot, humid places (My next job will be in a rain forest somewhere, I'm sure). I don't know what it is, but I'd take a lukewarm beer and fish brochettes on the beach over steak and cold drinks in the desert anytime.

So, who's thinking that I had an awful time and couldn't wait to get home?? That I never want to travel again? Can I see some hands? How many are betting I'm about to give it all up and run back to the 9-5 life in the states? Anyone out there? If you raised your hand, please confirm the web address you typed to get here. Did you mis-type www.waitingtodie.com? Maybe it was www.isuckatlife.com you intended to visit? Perhaps you were looking for www.ilockmydoorsallthetimebecauseimterrifiedofblackpeople.com?

No?

Well then, you should know me better than that – this was one of the coolest trips I've ever taken. I'm having a riot over here and I feel sorry for all you chumps, wherever you may be! (Well, except maybe you, Steven. Hes sailing uncharted islands and running down kangaroos in the outback right now.)

I had an incredible time – thank you everyone for the packages (especially the Florida crowd -- $120 shipping? Seriously? You guys must really like me) and emails wondering where I had disappeared to – its neat to find out people actually read this :) Hope the pictures tell a little bit of the story – It would take a short novella to do my past month justice.

Here's to being home-brewed in the US of A and 100% moss-free – Cheers.

Lying For the Shorties

2008-12-11T01:18:00.000-08:00

THIS POST IS EXTREMELY CRASS, PLEASE (GRANDMA) DO NOT READ THIS ONE. MAY I SUGGEST YOU GO HERE --> WWW.WEATHER.COM

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SERIOUSLY, PLEASE DONT DO THIS

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NO, REALLY, GO AWAY. IM NOT KIDDING. I MEAN, I KNOW YOULL STILL LOVE ME AND ALL, BUT REALLY.

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ACTUALLY, ANYTHING BAD HERE WAS MY FRIEND'S FAULT. I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. BLAME HIM. HE DOESN'T GO TO CHURCH.

I get thousands of emails a day. Thousands of adoring readers showing their appreciation for the bright spot this blog has become in their lives, a few (unoriginal) vitrulent attacks spawned from a seething jealously at my effortless badassery, and, not altogether unexpected, demands for the film production rights to my life. These are not new and are normally brushed aside with the flood of marriage offers, but one caught my eye today --- here, in unabridged form, is the request for your perusal --

"Matthew! Baby! Your blogs got that certain something! Gold, baby. Gold! Here in Hollywood, California that's what we've been looking for for a long time, my boy. The kids here? No talent. It's always the same rippling six packs and desperate sexual propositions on the road to fame... It's worn out, kid. But you?! You got something special. Hell, for a movie deal, I'd sleep with you and, kid, I don't often say that. But for you? I'll make an exception. The studio will literally throw any figure at you for the chance to produce your life in movie form. Money's not an object. Drugs? Women? What's your poison, Matt? Badda-bing I can make it happen. The only thing I don't get is what you actually do, kid? I mean, trust me, I know a quality package when I see it *softly pats you on the ass*, but who's the man behind the legend?"

Now, as you can imagine, yours truly is accustomed to habitual displays of genuflection, but this request had that certain balance between obsequiousness and offers of gratuitous amounts of money that so many young, nubile tarts don't yet understand. Also, he emoted a gentle pat upon my ass within the email which threw me for a loop, but I just figured it was the Hollywood in him. Hell, from all I've heard about that place Im sure he was surrounded by midgets serving lines of coke off of mirrors balanced on their heads and he was so hopped up on Red Bull and Quaaludes he actually thought he was cupping one of my supple cheeks. Beats me.

Anyway, I sent a email back to Mr. Happy-Hands telling him about my day jobs as an adventure ice climber/contract astronaut with forays into moonlighting as a lunar cartographer and heres the cheek I get in response--

"Matthew...Matthew... that's great and all. Rock climbing on Mars or whatever. Believe me, I'm impressed. But we're selling to the everyman here. Here in Hollywood, California our job is to trick these peons into thinking that they have a fucking thing in common with superstars and model goddesses who wouldn't even look that trailer trash in the eye. We need something a little more down to Earth. Stuff those red-state fucks are gonna eat out of the palm of my fucking hand. Badda-bing. God, I love my life. You like brandy, kid? I'll send you over a bottle. Anyway, point is, we need something more in tune with the common man. Whatcha got for me, baby?"

I feel the need to translate for you, so here it is -- he wanted me to lie. TO LIE. A large part of my appeal is the fact that its all happening (er, baby)! Its all in real time!!! So what can one do? I told him the truth - Im too noble to lie. Its true.

"Can't lie? ...*laughs for several minutes*... Listen, kid. I get what you're saying. It's real honorable. We can definitely spin that into a nod from the Academy later on. But let's cut the shit for a minute. We're just guys talking here. Two average Joes. And what I'm telling you is this... the movie business is about giving people a dream -- the will to keep going. Honesty doesn't sell. You think good ever triumphs over evil? You think the guy gets the girl? That ain't life, baby. But people don't want the truth. John Q. Jackass would take one look at your life and go shoot himself. What we're doing here is bigger than just you and me. It's for the kids, man. The cancer patients. And for them? Yeah, here in Hollywood, we lie. For the kids. I tell 'em Santa Claus is real and named Tim Allen. So, don't do it for me, babe. Do for those cancer wards. The ones with clowns and balloons and Playstations. Yeah... Yeah... That's right."

And you know what? That touchy-feely-sonufabitch had a point. It is my moral obligation - NAY - my patriotic duty as a red-meat-eating-native-born-American to give hope to those who have none. Those little kids in the cancer wards. So I do this for you, wee cancer tots. I lie here so you may relate to my life. I lie to give you hope. I lie to give you happiness. I lie to expand my bank account. God, I love my life.

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I'm whats known here as an informaticien. This means next to nothing in West Africa, seeing as if you can use Word and surf the web you are a West-African-Certified-Informaticien. Its not so hard to be an expert here. I work with principally two organizations here -- The University of Lome and Cafe Informatique. Cafe Info is one of the largest privately owned businesses here and is the largest ISP and the second largest cell provider in country.

Im working on a 5 year "state of technology throughout Togo" action plan to present to the government. I actually have about as much of an idea about what Im doing here as I do about lunar cartography.

At the university Im working to install a cyber cafe using only linux -- this is tougher than it sounds--

See those two black computers? Those are the University web site and email server. High tech here, folks, high tech.

So, my faithful public, thats just about all I do. I look at computer screens all day and work through email in a country where most of my colleagues don't have electricity and pee in dirt holes. I also drink cheap wine and cheese whenever possible. Thats class.

If you know whats going on here, put down the bag of cheetos and go outside and get some sun, NOW.

* with David Newstead contributing. He's originally from Ninety-Six, SC and has never actually been to Hollywood. California. Baby. He will still sleep with you, though.

_ on the __

2008-11-22T05:35:00.000-08:00

There are certain things that I, being some sort of quasi-employee of the federal government representing the US abroad, am not allowed to post here. Things like exact location (I didn't give GPS coordinates, but if you haven't figured out where I live it means you haven't sent me a package full of peanut butter and swedish fish, and in that case you can just go straight to hell), political preferences (I actually didn't even get to vote because of a lost ballot, but I'm sure we all know of the vast right-wing conspiracy to block votes of PC volunteers. And black people. And most definitely black volunteers. My god, can you imagine what'd happen if those commie bastards got into the white house?), and I most certainly can't write about what PC volunteers actually do with their free time, like when I travelled to _____________________________ with _________ and we ______________ when we _________________ with a _____________________ he borrowed from his _______ who one time actually ______________ but it was cool because _______________ without________________ which was incredible to see, because I didn't actually know someone could bend like that and we only paid her _____ CFA. We almost _______ 5 times, one time when the _________ almost went over the edge of the ___________, not to mention drinking way too much ________________ and _____________ while trying to _________________ and I told him it wouldn't work, but then again he is __________ and we all know how F-ed up THAT religion is, right?

So anyway, here are some only mildly incriminating pictures, you fill in the blanks until next fall, when the book will be published. Talk to me if you want international merchandising rights.

Fierte

2008-11-06T06:36:00.000-08:00

I was huddled around the small television in our country director's house with about a dozen other volunteers, waiting for Obama to step out to address the crowd in Chicago, after a night of no sleep, too many beers and a lot of laughter - For years now, I have tried to stay apathetic towards politics, hiding firm behind my mantra that no one man can really change anything. Watching Obama's victory speech, I couldn't help myself from tearing up and hoped and prayed to all that I hold dear that I am wrong. When bush was 'elected' I was a senior in high school, what to me seems like a lifetime ago, and these past 8 years have only turned me sour on the political process that I hear my parents and (maybe especially) my grandparents feel so proudly about.

But seeing Obama give that speech, hearing his strong, tersely metered diction, I actually found hope. It may sound silly, but emotions that I never knew existed welled up inside of me. I was ebullient from the shimmering hope of the next 4 years yet infinitely sad at the same moment -- saddened for all the ways that people are going to try and break Barack Obama, tear him down, destroy not only him, but what he stands for in the eyes of so many people in the US and (again, maybe especially) all those others around the world. Will they succeed? My guess is probably. Will Barack Obama's true colors be many dim shades grayer than we all hope? I say no, but he is only a man. Will he ever rise any higher than that 10ft platform he delivered his victory speech upon to the millions of us who felt the falling of tears and scratching at the backs of our throats?

All I can say is that, for me, gone is the oily slickness I feel when I think of my country, gone are the shadows of nepotism and hypocrisy I've always assumed were prerequisites within the government. Us sitting on the floor, lids glued open against impossible fatigue, Obama standing there 10 shades darker than I'll ever tan, and a million times brighter than I'll ever shine, I watched the man who returned my faith in my home take the weight of the world upon his shoulders and for the first time in my life I felt myself able to say that I am truly proud to be an American.

Orphaned Organs

2008-10-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

I don't know what it is inside of me, but just as I try to follow my intuition, that silent urging in situations, there come those times when I feel pushed to move – to go – to see something different. You can call it stir craziness, cabin fever, itchy feet – whatever you name it, it has been a driving force in my life, always leading me to places I've never expected to see. Yesterday the walls were closing in on me. The thought of being here in my house made me feel very tired and my heart race with anxiety at the same moment. Knowing the only thing to do was leave, I threw some odds and ends in a bag and got a taxi out of town. I remember an episode of The X-Files, one where a government-built subterranean antenna broadcasting ultra low frequency waves was causing peoples heads to pop like water balloons. It was actually due to a build-up of pressure behind the ear drums, and Scully and Mulder found that if they traveled west at a quick clip, the pressure would abate for a bit. Yesterday I felt my own bit of pressure here in Lome. Not as if the Togolese government can afford a head-popping secret antenna – there's only enough money in the official coffers here for a crippled infrastructure and the occasional presidential palace. No, I simply mean that as the wind rushed over my face and the landscape faded from sand and concrete to lush rolling hills, I felt the weight of my sedation peeling back and flying off like so many old layers of chipped paint.

I descended back upon Agou-Akoumawou to visit with the stage family and to eventually make my way to Cafe Kuma, a small coffee plantation nestled at the top of one of the mountains circling Kpalime. I needed to find Kujo, the proprietor, whose number went missing with my phone all those weeks ago. True, there were easier ways to find his number, many of which didn't involve leaving my couch, but it was nice to have an over-arching purpose for my impromptu vagabonding. I was at peace last night, relaxing with my surrogate parents and walking the familiar stretch of highway that forms the town. I met with the new stageres this morning and doled out some American sweets I've had stashed – they were all in high spirits, but looked as if their appendages had had a nasty run in with some sort of pox – the heralded akoumawou-tech-house-bugs strike again. Still – an upbeat crowd -

After coming back from the mountain today, Maman had a lunch prepared for me – pate with gbomadetsi (spicy spinach sauce), my favorite – this was interesting, however – now being here has facilitated in my losing any inhibitions I still had about food – granted, there wasn't much I wouldn't eat back in the states (man, you should have seen me at Bray's Island, my last restaurant) – but now be it bones, marrow, skin, fat, organs – bring it on. Hearts? Meaty. Lungs? Spongy. Intestines? If you blur your vision and imagine they are some type of expensive, exotic truffle, they taste just exactly like – you guessed it - intestines. Yum.

Yet today, I ran across a surprise in my gboma – a stray kidney bean. Odd, I thought – Why is there only one bean here? When I remembered there are no kidney beans in Togo, it made much more sense – ah, just a stray kidney. Fine, no problem, I could use the protein. Knowing they come in pairs just added to the excitement – I knew there was one still hiding out. Like finding two temporary tattoos in a box of cracker jacks.

Dear diary – jackpot.

Finding the 3rd kidney a few minutes later was only mildly disconcerting - I was hungry, you see. Truly bothersome, though, wasn't that there were more than one set of kidneys, nor that they were the only bit of meat in my otherwise vegetarian meal. It wasn't even the fact that a small, unsolicited act of poultricide had been commited just to spice up my lunch. No, the truly disturbing fact was the easily overlooked significance of the number of kidneys found in my meal. There were seven kidneys.

Seven.

You see, its not just that 4 chickens died to bring you this journal entry, its that even though 4 died, I only had 3.5 chicken's worth of kidneys. Think about that. I was tackling the idea that I had been served a prime number of kidneys. Where was the orphaned organ? I imagined all the stories I'd ever heard of traveling to Mexico and getting drugged at a club and waking up in an odd hotel room with stitches on my abdomen, only to die a slow death over the next 4 days from a build-up of toxins in my body that my harvested kidneys could no longer filter – except these were chickens, not humans, and they had never been to Mexico, nor ever experimented with psychotropic hallucinogens, and they sure as hell didn't know how to drink too much tequila and dance the meringue at 3am with overweight Mexican prostitutes on their spring break in Tijuana, trying to forget about the girl who dumped them after their senior prom. But I digress... Not to mention, where the hell do you get 7 kidneys from at one time? Is there an organ-lady-stall at the marche? Was I eating a fetisheur's last commission?

The hell if I know – you really think I was thinking that hard about it then and there? I popped those bad boys like popcorn shrimp.

Where Everyone Knows Your Name

2008-10-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

If someone were to ask me what I truly loved, a few things would come to mind. There are the bucolic standards – family, life, freedom – but assuming for just a second that I am a healthy, well-adjusted individual we can delve to a much more fun, superficial level. I would say that I love seeing my breath on a cold morning. I love the smell of sun-soaked skin after a day swimming in the river or searching for shark's teeth. I love it when sons show respect to their mothers. I love the exhaustion and relief that come intertwined at the end of a long run. I love the walking stick I had to leave in the states. I love hearing the exact right set of chords at the right time. I love the excitement that comes with taking a huge risk. I love waking up and trading a knowing smile with someone. I love wine. I love cheese danishes (I'm talking, really love cheese danishes).

As I'm sure you can imagine, I could keep going. We all have those little things that make us smile and keep us centered even in unfamiliar environs. My environs are quite unfamiliar to me, so I've had to make a concerted effort to find things that can keep me centered, balanced, focused. When we fall out of sync with ourselves, we end up falling into patterns of extremes – adjectives followed by 'too much' – sleeping too much, reading too much, crying too much, drinking too much. At home, surrounded by family and friends our patterns keep us grounded, if albeit at times, quite bored. At home, I drink lots of hot tea and take long walks in the woods. I find back-alley bars and sit for hours with a bottle of wine and a good book. I hug my parents. Here its a bit different – in such a different environment its much easier to go a little ape-shit from time to time. So, what to do? Well, I've found a new love – everyone, meet tchouk. Tchouk, everyone.

Tchouk is, at its simplest, home-brewed millet beer. Millet is ground in a mill (called a moulin here – a windmill) which produces a red clay-colored powder. This powder is mixed in with a huge pot of water and left to settle for a few hours. When all seems calm, the froth at the top is scraped off and a huge fire is lit underneath. The brew is stirred for many hours and then left to ferment for many days. As a fun bonus, charcoal is thrown in with every batch. When asked why, I received the all-encompassing response that, by the earnest look across Maman Colette's face, settled all further discussion– 'for the ancestors'.

Still, by reducing it to its basic constituents does it a great injustice, for tchouk's meagre means belie its greater purpose as a whole. Tchouk comes originally from the northern parts of Togo, brewed by the Kabye and Kotokoli. I've heard the best of the best can be found near Dapaong and Mango. Brewed every morning and fermented in either 3 or 5 day shifts, a community's morning visit to the tchoukstand (called the 'cafe matinal') is comparable to a morning coffee at Hardee's back in the states. Gossip is traded, stories swapped, the difficulties of the day sloughed off with each calabash. There are two main types of tchouk – the vrai tchouk and tchokpa (I am clueless as to the spelling there). They are fundamentally the same thing, with only a few variations in the brewing originating from their locations up north. Tchouk tends to be a bit sweeter, less fermented, and less alcoholic. Tchokpa on the other hand, is darker, spicier, more fermented, and quite a bit stronger (still, maybe only 5% by volume). I've heard lengthy diatribes from local experts expounding upon even more minute differences between further delineations (loso-micine, kabye-micine, dapaong-micine) but for all intensive purposes, just know that there are a few types and while you aren't expected to drink one exclusively over the others, depending on where you are from you are expected to profess your love for your natal brew, no matter how deferentially you choose to do so.

Now there are much more efficient vessels for inebriation in country. A 50cfa (a dime's-worth) shot of sodobe will buddy you up much faster than 5 or 6 calabashes. But tchouk isn't drank here as we would drink it in the states. Tchouk is used primarily to escape from the heat of the day and relax with conversation. There was tchouk stand a stone's throw away from my house in Agou-Akoumawou, which I used almost daily as an impromptu Ewe lesson. It didn't take long before I was known throughout my stage as Mattchouk. I've continued the tradition here in Lome, and truly enjoy my daily excursions. As a happy side effect, my Ewe has become relatively passable --- and I owe it all to those dirty calabashes of tropical swill. So, in the effort to better integrate, learn some local language and stay centered, anytime I see my local maman's drapeau sitting out front of the tchoukoutchounuƒe I always make sure to sidle up and enjoy a few quiet minutes with friendly smiles where everyone knows my name. And, hey, here its not a bad thing that me tro va egbe sia egbe. If I come back every day, it just makes me one of the locals.

AIDS ride blues

2008-10-27T02:47:00.000-07:00

Awoke from the concrete this morning to another breakfast of Ablo and gboma (sweet, moist corn cakes and spicy spinach sauce). Sitting across from everyone, shared happiness and exhaustion passing between smiles and looks throughout the room, it was hard for me to be down on my luck -- still, as I shoveled the congealed spiciness into my gaping maw, the slightest urge to retch tickled the back of my throat and made me yearn for home in a way Ive never really felt before. Maybe it was the Ablo (which I love, actually), maybe it was the soiled biking clothes I had been wearing for 4 days that lent me a wonderful musk of a middle school gym locker room, maybe it was the heat and humidity that, even at 6AM, was already laying heavy on the landscape like a quilt thrown across a freshly made bed. Maybe it was simple exhaustion, or the simple quiet of the morning that left me to my thoughts that tickled at the shadow of loneliness that had been spreading from the back of my mind for a few days, but I would have slapped someone's mother for a 5 am trip to Bojangles on a cold morning for boberry biscuits and shitty coffee. And just because I could, I would have smoked a cigarette and listened to an epic song while gazing at the sun coming up to make it more like a movie.

This is all coming from the last full day of AIDS Ride, a yearly event here where I met with a group of 10 or so other volunteers from Maritime (our region here in the south) and we embarked on a 5 day bike tour through nigh-impassable reaches of the interior to sensibilize small villages and schools about AIDS and preventative measures. We covered beween 40 - 60k a day in about 130 degree temps, over an amazing array of sandy impasses, sandy hills, sandy paths, sand covered slopes, sand filled pits, and through sandy villages. I was up until now unaware of the charms of biking long distances in the dead heat of the day, but let me tell you, its quite invigorating in a what-in-the-hell-have-I-done-to-deserve-this sorta way. Also if there are any questions, or anyone needs a quick condom demo, Im your man to come to.

Dont you be talkin bout no AIDS...

On a related note, I have decided that my Peace Corps project will be to pave the entire country of Togo. Asphalt for all.

No, hon, you can keep the shoes on...

2008-09-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

Being from the south, I know a little something about wearing sandals. I have worn beat-up, run-down petite thongs of cow's hide in almost every situation imaginable, save maybe funerals and marathons. I have graduated college,

ridden horse-back through the deserts of Giza,

hiked mountains on the dead sea, sold out medium-sized coffee joints in very small towns,

had run-ins with a few metal poles,

became a Peace Corps volunteer,

been to weddings and actually just solved the Rhiemann-Zeta hypothesis, all while porting some slick John Kerry namesakes. Now, granted, at this point, I have some pretty interesting-looking feet (just check out that big toenail), but like my buddy Rayan says, “this guy's feet tell stories.” You could surmise I wear sandals so much because I've lived on the beach for half my life now, but I'm leaning more towards airport security -

Security guard: Sir, I'll need you to remove your shoes, plea-
MT: *slides backwards out of sandals and pirouettes with Michael Jackson crotch-grab*
Security guard: Wow. That was actually pretty cool. Damn, how much do you fly, son?

So, anyway, as I was saying, flip-flops and I get on well enough. Here in Togo, the chaussure of choice for the paysans are Nigerian made plastic shower sandals, called 'tapettes'. Now, to be fair, I was even a little cautious of them when I first arrived. I had my leather deals and didn't feel like changing. But, as things tend to do, they broke and all I had to fall back on was a blue and white spotted pair of taps that my host brother Tikwi had given me during stage. Begrudgingly, I put them on, but quickly found out why everyone here wears them. First, they're only slightly more expensive than going barefoot, and secondly, they are actually pretty damn comfortable. And Togolese can do ANYTHING in tapettes – play football, ride motorcycles, carry pounds and pounds of yams on their heads – I began to feel a bit more integrated the day I started biking through Lome traffic in a wife-beater and tapettes.

So, where am I going with all of this, eh? Well, I've recently found out that there seems to be one thing Togolese don't do wearing tapettes. Togolese do not rob people while wearing sandals. They don some off brand sneakers (adimas, punas) to hop 10ft. compound walls and slither through kitchen windows. We found the tracks, we have the proof (well, that and all our shit is gone). Now I've been robbed before, quite a number of times, but I think we met the ballsiest (read: hungriest) thief in Togo. Me and 9 others were sleeping at a transit house in Lome after a night of festivities and awoke to find a few articles missing. Turns out that after our sneakered perp crept into the house, he deftly pilfered our precious gadgets from besides our sleeping heads. Seriously, props to you, ballsy thief. There were 10 of us in the house, 7 of us large yovo men. Why, oh why, couldn't he just have made a little bit of noise? Because he wasn't wearing tapettes, thats why. Or he was a ninja. Either way, I made out alright, though – he only made off with my phone - I didn't even have my wallet with me.

It had actually been stolen earlier in the day.

10 bucks says that guy wasn't wearing sandals, either.

The Dangers of Tawuk

2008-09-16T03:48:00.000-07:00

I often find myself sitting around, staring out the window or looking down at maps, wondering what somewhere new looks and smells like. As my eyes draw their imaginary line from point A to wherever my itch can get scratched, they invariably run through a few of Rome's enduring legacies. Seeing that I need to get to the other side of them, I do as any well-bred farm animal knows how to do and I cross the frigging road. This, like each and every day for all of you, never has really mattered too much for me, even in some of the odder places I've seen. I'm American, so lots of things that are common place in most of the world are supposed to scare me and offend my egalitarian sensibilities, so just in case there are any of my compatriots reading this, I'll take the time to explain. I'm wont to avoid cliched descriptions filled with twenty-something catch-phrases and buzz-words (it was like, CRAZY last night, you have no idea) so I'll try my best to avoid using overly abused adjectives when trying to describe something as mundane as local traffic. Take Paris, for example – running around the l'Arc de Triomph is a large round-about with 6 lanes of cars and motos zigging where others had zagged a moment before. They work it out, no stop signs, no painted lines. In Athens, taxi drivers go fast, something along the lines of Le Mans fast, down streets hardly wide enough for a horse cart. It works itself out, too – either all those roads are one way, or Greek taxi drivers are privy to unstoppable bouts of preventative premonition. Growing up back home in Laurens, we had folks like Moffett Caine, who, regardless of circumstances, drove 25 mph. When you saw a row of traffic 20 cars deep in my home town you knew there was either a funeral or Moffett was going down to Hickory Point for his daily coffee – either was an acceptable excuse for being late to work. Crossing the street in Cairo is either a feat of unsurmountable faith in God, or one of the world's most competitive bouts of active natural selection. It helps if you stand beside someone and cross with them - they'll get hit first. The Germans have their spiffy Autobahn where you can go as fast as you want, but, lets get real here Germany, just because all your citizens are androids with superhuman reflexes who can drive at those ridiculous speeds in their creepy 'German-engineered' automobiles doesn't make me jealous. It didn't help you in WWII, so eat me (in your FACE, krauts).

Here, however, is different. Chickens do not cross the road here. No, chicken, just stay – stay! Stay back! Its not worth it, chicken! Think of your unhatched chicks! What would they do without a mamma to run after! You don't have to prove anything to me! Don't be a hero! - Take away the semblance of laws, and you get a system that works with utmost efficiency, but only for those who can take advantage of the efficiency. Say that it rains for two days straight and a large portion of the paved roads in Lome are flooded. If you are one of the lucky few to have a car, you will be zipping along, minding your own bees wax, until you come to an impassable part of your road. But, wait, whats this? The opposite lane of traffic looks drivable! Well let me just hop this concrete median and drive the exact same speed I was going, in the wrong direction! No, hun, its all good – look, Im just going to honk a whole lot and let everyone else swerve to avoid me. Car breaks down in the middle of the road and there is no where you can take it? Don't worry, everyone will swerve to avoid it as well, until it gets completely dismantled overnight as it sits. Are there ever accidents, you ask? Well, yeah, I'm sure there are, but, c'mon, you wanna make an omelet, you gotta crack a few eggs, right! Am I right? Better yet, you wanna make it to the yam festival on time you gotta crack a few side-view mirrors, eh? You feel me? No, Matt, we don't follow.

Sometimes, when a car swerves to avoid a stalled taxi or hops a curb to get somewhere a bit faster, things get hit. Trash cans, signs, chickens, motos, people. It happens. Sometimes, just sometimes, when white Toyota SUVs barrel around large trucks on the right side of the lane going 40 kph, their side view mirrors connect with unsuspecting pedestrians on their way to a quiet night of hot tea and rooftop reading at their favorite Lebanese restaurant. Were you aware that when the side-view mirror of a white Toyota SUV connects with a human body at 40 kph, it shatters like the dreams of a child sitcom star? The words 'pipe bomb' come to mind.

You might be surprised, but theres a certain level of pride that comes with inflicting that much damage to someone's vehicle. I suppose in the future if I really need a rush I'll go club a few windshields, maybe steal some lug nuts or something, but for now I'll just stick to being the passive hit-and-run victim – it makes for a better story.

Could I commute to Accra from here?

2008-08-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

Its been a few days now, and I feel that I've gotten settled in a bit. I live in a quartier called Avenoue, which is on the outskirts of Lome. Lome itself is separated by a long...(erm, maybe 'lagoonish-thing' describes it) 'lagoonish-thing' that divides it into basically downtown and the suburbs. Something near 900,000 people call this place home and like it or not, it is where the vast majority of business is done in Togo. Compared to Accra in Ghana (the "Golden City" as Ive heard it called), or even Coutenou in Benin, Lome is (so I hear) not as beautiful or developed, but is still not without its own charms. It smells like salt water and motor oil and even has a cool night every now and again. If Accra is NYC, then Lome is kinda like the Trenton of West Africa.

Here Is my house. I live in a compound with another family, who stay in the larger house across from mine. I have, by all accounts, a huge house for a volunteer and it has been a task trying to furnish it.

Lookit that porch - PC must have known I was southern -- When I buy some rocking chairs, it is ON.

There are lots of other rooms, but they're boring and empty. Can anyone fit a few mattresses into a flat rate box?

This is Sami. Hes 4, from visiting from Burkina. I have never heard a kid who talked so much. I have never met a kid I wanted to hear talk so much, at that - his French is immaculate.

The main avenue of Avenoue (ha).

Well, there ya go. I promise to return with something that will incite a little more emotion, but until then, welcome to my home.

Capital Calculus

2008-08-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

Being that I have been posted and already spent a week in the grand city of Lomé, I have taken it upon myself to find the hangouts, the best stores, the marché mamas with the best deals, the coldest beers and the best restaurants throughout the city. Our entire stage has been here since Wednesday morning and I have diligently given the low down on the happening locales. For 5 days now I have been batting .1000, giving excellent directions, haggling taxi prices and pegging the best hookah and schwarma in the Maritime region. For our last night here, I felt that I should take a few folks out to one of the busier parts of town, to sit outside, sip some drinks and enjoy a few fire roasted brochettes (skewered meat – don't ask what kind of meat, I don't know, nor do I want to know). It was a perfect night, clear sky, bright stars, crisp and breezy, the glowing avenues full of potential. We embarked after a moderate dinner at the flophouse, renting a taxi to the center of town to a little etablissment know around here as Capital Brochettes. The restaurant sits across from a hopping night club and the flickering neon and staccato rhythms of bad Nigerian hip-hop were floating their way across the divided highway to the plastic lawn furniture holding the dozens of locals all enjoying a similar evening. We rolled up like hollywood, grabbing a table at the back corner of the sandy pavilion and ordered a round of drinks and a few brochettes for the group to munch on. It didn't take long before we were trading quips and stories and having quite a grand time.

I feel confident here that you have the clairvoyance to divine that something was soon to happen to shake things up a bit. I have had 3 of the greatest days of my life back-to-back-to-back, but I shant be writing about those here. Believe me when I say that no one likes to hear about your successes, so grab a snack, turn up the Metallica and come on back for a petite rant on customer service Africaine.
The first portent to send things amiss was the manifestation of a platter of an odd creamy salad, with two small pieces of baguette. Granted, I had ordered 'salade' when I could've ordered 'legumes' but considering I ordered 4 brochettes avec salade et baguette, along with some plantains frites, I figured it was pretty self-explanatory.

30 brochettes later, I am now confident in saying that it was not, in fact, self explanatory.

I was, at one time a comp sci major down in sunny Charleston. I'm pretty good with computers, but when sitting beside cute girls in calculus class, I am incredibly bad at calculus. As it turns out, you need to pass the calculus classes to then take more calculus classes so you can get a piece of paper that permits you to be an even bigger nerd, so, knowing when to bow out gracefully, I became a business major. That being said, I am no math whiz. So when we were given 30 brochettes, I figured, hey, I must have ordered something like 4 plates of brochettes as opposed to 4 brochettes. We laugh, shake heads begrudgingly and loosen our belts. It has since occurred to me that even at 4 plates of brochettes, 30 is only divisible by 4 if fractions are involved, and, after double checking, I'm positive we had no fractional skewers.

Also of interest was the platter of soggy, fat, sweet bananas that seemed to have fallen in a vat of grease and been taken out almost immediately. I may not have been born a francophone, but I know what a 'plantain frite' is, and soggy they are not.

Still, as I alluded to, my week has been phenomenal, I have just gotten paid and I am feeling generous. Bring it on, universe, pile on the soggy fruit, you can't ruin my evening.

Even if the bill is for over 15,000 CFA. 15 thousand CFA.

I could buy quite a few plantain trees for quite a bit less than that.

...Touché, universe, touché.

Aching Uterii

2008-08-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

I would rather like to avoid most cliches of the blogging culture. I know that no one really cares what I had for breakfast or what happened between David and Sally or my top-ten-lists-of-anything-whatsoever-at-ALL. Seriously, if this ever regresses to the point that I am writing about anything at all remotely related to fashion, politics, or entertainment, I want you to invite me out to lunch and then run me down with your car.

To make sure I don't spend anytime near any of your vehicle's grills anytime soon, I've made it a point to find interesting things to write about. Today, its kids. The Togolese are an absolutely gorgeous bunch of folks and the kids are something altogether spectacular. I don't know if I find most babies ugly, or if its just white American kids who are so hideous, but, in the inimitable words of a good friend, "my uterus aches every time I see a Togolese child."

I won't even go into the women here. My grandparents could be reading this, yeah?

Angry Woodlands Creatures

2008-08-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

He spoke first, without looking up.

"You know, I remember the last time I was treated like an eight year old. I didn't appreciate it then, either."

"Yeah, and when was that?" She asked.

He took a quick pull from his cigarette and blew the smoke to the side. He turned and met her gaze with a cocksure grin.

"When I was eight."

...and there is about everything I need to write about our pre-service training (we call that 'stage', pronounced 'stahj'). As of last Thursday, I and the other 30 or so folks I flew out with 3 months ago are now official volunteers. Yippee. Festivities were held at our country director's house, (dressing to the 9's, speaking local language for the ceremony on Togolese national TV, eating brochettes and drinking beer) which was followed by festivities at large in Lome (less ceremony, more beer and stripper pole dancing). So, in a few photos, we had --

The look of success

Ethnic deversity and incredible tailoring

Dancing, dancing, dancing

Funny Faces

Sexy Faces

Asian Faces

More Dancing

And in a stunning surprise appearance, we even had a celebrity or two crash the party --

I think Qaddafi was celebrating the re-establishment of political ties, but hey, I'll take what we get.

Also of interest, the following morning I learned what it feels like to have a pissed-off badger trying to claw its way out of your head through your eyeballs.

And yeah, absolutely, I'd do it all again.

Off to my new home now--

The True African Legacy

2008-08-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

From time to time I've fancied myself quite the entrepreneur – so much so that I've been lucky enough to be carted half-way round the globe to pass on my experiences doing things with buzz-worthy names like 'capacity-building' and 'synergistic facilitation'. However, now that my feet are on the ground, its beginning to dawn on me that the bit about me knowing something about business is worth about as much as that tract of swampland I bought out in Nevada – the true entrepreneurs are here, sneaking yams across borders, carting boxes of fresh baked bread to the street corners every morning, using cell phone connections to run back-door internet cafes. Africa's strength lies in its people, in their resilience, in their ability to create jobs where none exist.

The road between Lome (the capital) and Kpalime (the closest city to our staging) is called, pragmatically, the route national. This road connects the capital to the uppermost corner of Togo, at the Burkinabe border, acting as a life-line through the impassable parts of the interior. There are other roads, for sure, and where there aren't roads, there soon will be, but most of these are a bit like a moto-cross rally, and, at worst, something resembling the surface of the moon. 14 of us were coming back up the route national yesterday, having all just finished 8 days visiting our future posts, establishing business contacts, reconnoitering the surroundings, establishing our households, and, in my case, tracking down a stable supply of schwarma. We spent the night at a fellow PCV's, trading stories, grilling au americain, and drinking about 5 too many beers, and were all in various stages of lethargy for the ride back. We jostled along, avoiding livestock and taxis, swerving for potholes and mud deposits from the deluge that started 12 hours earlier and had yet to let up, but never slowing down. Once you step foot in a bush taxi, you go as fast as possible, as much of the time as possible. Sure, taxis flip, but hey, relax - you're gonna die sooner or later anyway. The speed is a necessity, as things here travel more by momentum than locomotion. If you can get something going here (read: if), only a handful of things will ever stop it before its final destination – (most of these fall into the 'aw, shit' category) things like Satan rampaging across the hinterland, sudden chauffeur defenestration, or, as we all found out, unofficial checkpoints consisting of shirtless locals and very big logs. You see, where you or I would see a dull stretch of highway, Africans see a meal ticket. In case you were wondering, there are lots of logs in Africa. Lots. I call it job security.

Cost to move a log in Togo – 50 CFA and up, depending on disposition and skin color -

Sometimes the only difference between capitalism and extortion is what side of the wallet you are on.

A Few Photos

2008-07-20T12:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get all caught up being funny and edgy, that I forget to actually write anything of actual merit. This idea is a derivative from a night of drinking cold-ish beers around a molded plastic table down at the Yovo support group's regular watering hole, Le Prestige. It was the average night of poignant culturally offensive jokes deftly interwoven with subversive political commentary, when I noticed that if I were to compress everything I say within a day, I could squeeze all valuable nuggets of info into about two sentences.

Now don't think Im turning soft on you - far from it - maybe its just time for some perspective into the life of a transient pessimist. Inherent entertainment value, you ask? Ill give it 4/10, but if you are reading this, you either really like me, or you're my mother (Love you, mom), so you'll cherish it regardless.

Ive been stewing slowly for the past 6 weeks in a small-ish mountain town called Agou-Akoumawou. This is where it looks like on a map -
This is what it looks like from the top of Mount Agou, the highest point in Togo, 1000m above the sea.

Here is some of my Togolese family - Maman wakes up every morning around 4am and starts frying Kanami (fried fish). My first memories of Africa will be forever entwined with the sound of bad techno and speaking in tongues ('praisethalawd' and woezolo - 'welcome' in ewe - sound damn close) from the neighbors radio and the smell of coconut oil crackling outside my window.

(you know, Im an IT guy, and I still cant figure out how to position these pictures acceptably - bah)

And here's a Swedish Fish Sandwich juxtaposed on top of an Arab. Call it post-modern if you will.

Stay a little longer and I might just make a joke about a Polack. Keep it tuned here-

Absolutes are for Winners

2008-07-19T10:17:00.001-07:00

7.12.08

The danger with using absolute statements is that sooner or later you are going to box yourself in by your own (probably spontaneous) outbursts. If you, like me, are prone to random acts of jumping, squirming, running, eating, screaming, wandering and cussing, every few bits you see something that warrants a 'best', a 'greatest', a 'loudest'. Every now and again, you just need a really good 'evaaar' to really nail it home. If any of you reading this have known me for longer than say, 3 minutes, then you know how comforting it is to have me along with you at all times of the day - Why, thank you Matt, this probably is the most delicious meal I have ever prepared. You know, now that you mention it, this IS the nicest drive Ive taken between my house and Piggly Wiggly. Well actually, I was thinking of giving it away, but damn, you're right - the 87 Nissan Sentra is the best thing thats ever come out of Japan. Yes, I do love waffles - Big time.

Now obviously, I must keep a cache of retractions handy for every now and again, like that time "the hottest girl I had ever seen" walked past, followed soon thereafter by the CofC women's volleyball squad - (actually, that one hasn't bothered me too much) Seriously though, I had bigger fish to fry at that moment. (Best. mistake. EVER.) Here in Togo, where something like a hot dog, or, hell, a hot shower, is enough to amaze, I understand that the scale has been a bit skewed for me. I know that Im not actually going to jump on the next sharp object I find if I have to eat one more yam. I know that Im not quite as scary as the screams of the enfants who see the giant white devil (we call that a 'yovo' in these here parts) would lead you to believe. I am pretty sure that if I threw something down the latrine, something would probably knock on my door in the middle of the night and try to give it back to me. (That could vie for the coolest thing ever, just to let you know.) So, here in Togo, amidst all this relativity, Im going to do as the guy at an internet cafe told me when I asked if the connection worked 'bien' ('c'est togo-bien, monsieur') and try and keep my absolutes relative -

The 4 hours of biking today over the Nyogbo-Kpalime dirt road that falls somewhere between this- and this -

was the most exhausting thing I have ever done (in Togo). The lunch I had was the most amazing thing I have ever eaten in my life (in Togo). The Shower I had after getting home was the most amazing cold-water-outdoor-bucket-shower I have ever had the incalculable pleasure of taking (in Togo). The yams I had for dinner didn't turn me suicidal (yet). Today was one of the most satisfying days I have ever had (in Togo). The banana split I had after lunch was singularly the best banana split I have ever had in my whole frigging life (EVER).

Bokabalo, mes amis--

The Lome Vay-Kay

2008-06-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

When you become sick in a foreign land, everything becomes suspect - the food you eat, the water you drink, the bed you sleep in and the people you talk to. You find yourself eating less, wondering how long you can go without food, just in case you eat something that may not agree with you. You peer through bottled water as if you could see the guilty party floating between the molecules, waiting to curl up in your stomach. You go to sleep early and wake late, hoping to avoid as much social interaction as possible. You sniff things and poke things and taste things and give the raised eyebrow to just about everything you come in contact with. You find yourself saying things like 'hey, it could be worse' and 'at least Im not...' then cursing yourself when it -A) becomes worse and B) you find that you, in fact, are.

So, here I sit in the med unit in Lome, nursing my tropical virus with candy bars and lukewarm cokes while saying things involving worse situations and glass half full analogies and I can't help but feel like a bit of a criminal. Sure, 104 degree temperatures and losing your guts from both ends 12 times a day sounds like a pain, but there's something about the internet and hot showers that makes it seem like I won out on this deal.... revenez vites mes amis....

If Magritte were here, he'd do it too...

2008-06-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

"Tu aime bien le togo-jeen, hein?" My African brother, Antoine, was looking at me with a grin lying somewhere a few steps across the line to mischievous. I had only shot a passing glance at the collection of unmarked bottles sitting on the table by the front door, but soon found myself being pushed towards the mystery liquids. Each bottle had obviously been used for another purpose earlier in their lives, their peeling labels displaying 'scotch' or 'Chinese plum wine' now guarding something very obviously something else. These are the things we are warned about long before we step foot in a foreign country - our training classes have topics like 'cultural awareness', 'dysentery' and, from time to time, 'unmarked liquids you most definitely shouldn't drink even though we know you're going to anyway' - I happened to like that group exercise quite a bit. Flakes of peppers or roots or berries sometimes flowed out of the bottles as shots were being poured, the sediment from each bottle giving only the slightest hint as to what had been fermenting there in the tropical heat. I stood with my companions around the table, the table that sat under the dangling fluorescent light that hung outside the sheet that acts as the front door of the house, the house that sat 5 minutes from the training center where I have classes everyday, which is an hour and a half from Lome by taxi, which itself is half a world away from anyone reading this. I stood there, a world away from some and 5 minutes from others, beside Togolese neighbors and family, a glass of something that looked deceptively like paint thinner and smelled a bit like kerosene in my hand. Murmurs in the local patois of Ewe and French floated between us as we continued to pour glasses for everyone, the occasional smile thrown my way followed by the word 'togogin'. "Tu aime bien le togo-jeen, hein?" I wasn't very sure if I liked it or not - as surprising as it sounds, I'm not that used to ingesting equatorial bathtub wine, but it was as good a time as any to find out. As the last glass found its place, we all poured a bit on the ground for les ancestres and then threw back one of the many unforgettable life experiences that I've found here.

Come to find out, I sleep like a baby after four good life experiences.

Reppin the Penguin

2008-06-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

So Im working in Small Enterprise Development, focusing on IT work. One of my main interests is open-source implementation in developing areas. Can you imagine my excitement when I looked across the terminal in the Philly airport and saw the two hippest Little-Linux-Laptops on the planet -- the OLPC (one laptop per child) and the Asus EEEPC -- chilling on the laps of two fellow volunteers? And all the n3rds rejoiced. amen.

2008-06-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

The humid West African air hits you like a brick when stepping from within the confines of the stale recirculated air of a plane. It invades your nostrils and pores, adhering your clothes to you body and filling you with an instant largesse that only mojitos and naps seem to be able to combat. The smells are those of a warm summer night and something falling on the over-ripe side of 'pleasantly sweet'. I was taken back to Managua as I surveyed the green landscape and tropical trees waving my way into their country, the smells and urban planning of Lome seeming deceptively familiar. I find Togo beautiful in the way you look at an old barn or the rusted shell of your first car. The poverty is so apparent as to be comforting, the half completed or half-razed shells of buildings so frequent as to be reassuring. The sandy streets and shuffling citizens tell me 'look here, this is the way things have been. Come see how the world really lives.' Lome lies on the coast, the center of town situated no more than a few clicks from the Ghanese border. A few paved roads act as arteries for the sidestreets and communities, all tied together by the beach road running parallel to the shore. It is hot here, and humid, but no more so than a balmy summer day in South Carolina. In an effort to send us off with a thorough grounding in West African economics, the welcoming commitee that greeted us at the hostel (current PCVs) have shown us the many ways to purchase many types of local beers, all falling in at well under a dollar. I must say, its taken me quite a lot of studying, but Im beginning to get the idea.

The group I arrived with are mostly young, green, college grads, here out of a vague sense of social consciousness and white guilt - I cant say Im any different. There are a few professionals in the group, and we have all meshed well and are progressing on towards what Im sure will soon seem like an extended family. Our staging starts tomorrow, when we leave for Agou, to the north, where we will meet our host families and move into what will be our homes for the next 3 months. We are all re-packing after our few days here, ready to begin what we all started so many months back.

As I stared at the sky last night, the moon shining through a few murky clouds, something resounded inside of me, saying 'yes, this is where you should be. yes, your intuition is right. yes, your journey has only started.' So I sat and stared and let myself be enveloped in the magic of the sights, sounds, smells, coincidence, surprise and interrelatedness of it all. Then I stood, brushed myself off, grabbed my bags and walked through the gate. Welcome to Africa.

2008-06-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

In a post-apocalyptic future, where true heroes stand tall and lead the battle against the cyborg armies, we will all wear this mustache.

Standing valiantly, defying the tyrannical metal rule and all good taste, this warrior from the future waited diligently by us as a new plane was found to replace our cancelled flight. I found it odd he wouldnt simply take off in his rocket-car, but I wasn't about to ask him about it - dude is bad.

Arrived in Philly 6 hours late, but was able to catch the end of orientation and meet my other volunteers. The night was filled with cheesesteaks, dive bars, and brotherly love. Let me tell you, folks here are serious about their cheesesteaks, their dive bars, and their paper, rock, scissors. I hear its how they'll fight wars in the future. Paper covers rock, chump.

Right, off to the future - Togo tomorrow.

2008-06-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

April 4 - Cairo 10:28AM

Slept for an award-winning 14 hours last night. Upon returning to the hotel after an afternoon excursion to the Egyptian museum and over the nile, I settled in to read, shirtless, window open to the street below, and fan on high. After Kavalier and Clay failed the saboteur's nefarious anti-semitic scheme, Clay discovered his budding homosexuality and Thomas Kavalier became stuck in a Portuguese Convent on account of the measles, I reclined and closed my eyes around 4 pm for a well deserved nap before dinner. I awoke this morning at 6:30, refreshed and, surprisingly enough after sleeping through dinner - not incredibly hungry.
I have spent the morning wandering the slender cobblestone streets of the muslim old quarter, observing the sights and smells of a local market not designed for the tourists dollar. My greatest surprise was not the huge flanks of beef hanging for inspection, or the clans of stray cats who wait outside the poultry shops, hoping to dine on an unlucky hen's discarded head, for these scenes can be found in any large market. No, my surprised smile came from the warmth and friendliness of those I met on the street. From the returned smiles and kind greetings of those I passed, to the gentleman who showed me around the market, implicitly stating that he owned no shop and wanted to baksheesh, but simply wanted to practice his english and show me where to go for the best experiences. I was touched as normally I am ignored as a clueless foreigner, or (as it more often is the case) hassled as a clueless foreigner, and hardly wecomed as a world citizen. it seems I only need to dig a little beneath the surface, to venture to the local's part of a city, to experience the middle-eastern hospitality I hear oft-lauded, but until this point has been elusive.
My foray into the museum yesterday was a necessary occurrence, but on that, for me, was completely superfluous. The sheer number of artifacts is overwhelming, with most being displayed with no special protection, susceptible to countless aspiring street artists and kinaesthetically excited tourists. I was feeling less that perfect yesterday, bringing a Dahabian bug with me in tow from Sinai, but the $30 US entry fee to see the mummies after a $10 entrance fee to the museum, was enough for me to say 'bugger it all, Im going to read' which I did on the steps of the main atrium of the ground floor of the museum. This, as it turns out, was the most satisfying part of my historical interlude.
As a side-note, I have discovered that the cost of street food here can be drastically reduced by employing a raised eyebrow and an incredulous tone -

MT: Mumtaz - shukran. Bikam?
Vendor: Ten pounds, sir.
MT (incredulously): Ten pounds?
Vendor: Eight pounds, sir.
MT (very incredulously, with look of shock): EIGHT pounds?
Vendor: Your sandwich, sir - eight pounds.
MT (utter disbelief): EIGHT POUNDS?
Vendor (defeated): Six pounds, sir.

Once the same price is repeated three or four times, I feel I have received a sufficient discount that comes from the substantial mark up that everything I consume instantly receives.

Well, off to see the pyramids.

Stairs and more stairs

2008-06-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

May 26th - Masada - 10:10AM

Strenuous 5am hike up the Snake Path that ascends the mountain fortress of Masada. Thinking ourselves young and invincible we started up at a brisk pace, only to be winded within 5 minutes. As we sat, after many curses and drinks of water we spied a troupe of 50-something Germans threatening to overtake us. Not to be outdone by the ageing krauts, this evolved into a 40 minute tortoise and hare style battle where, to the joy of our young egos, we did finish first. Masada was more impressive in its ambition than its current physical state, but a trek to Herrod's Palace on the cliff face made the trip memorable, if only for the pity we shared with the countless ancient laborers who had to ascend and descend the edifice daily. On returning, after a breakfast of neon orange drink and boiled eggs, I inquired at the desk how to get to the dead sea from here.

MT: How far is it to walk to the Dead Sea from here?
Receptionist: You must go 15km up or down the road to get in.
MT: No, I mean right here at Masada.
R: Oh, no, it is forbidden to swim here. It is very dangerous, you can drown here. You may even drown before you reach the sea.

Steven and I have been a bit concerned about the apparent mid-land drownings. We will go south now, to Eilat, with a vigilant eye on the Sea's shore, in case it should try to overtake us.